Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

by Benjamin Dreyer

You’re not going to like this: Up until the late eighteenth century or so, no one particularly cared whether you chose to lie down or lay down, so long as you got horizontal. Then some word busybodies got wrought up on the subject, a rule was born, and schoolchildren (and writers) have been tortured on the subject ever since.

Use “loath” as an adjective; use “loathe” as a verb.

To loose something is to set it free. Oddly, to unloose something is also to set it free.

Something lush or plentiful is luxuriant:

Which is to say: The distinction is sort of kind of utterly insupportable.

No matter how many times you see “mitigate against,” which is all the time, it is never correct.

That is, “mucous” is an adjective, “mucus” a noun. Mucous membranes produce mucus.

A fit of pique is a peeved little tantrum; to pique one’s interest is to stimulate and excite it.

The thing itself—of a potato, a banana, a lemon, an orange—is a peel. Plus—and this is why we have the verb “peel”—one removes it before eating. As opposed to a skin—an apple’s, say—which outside of cooking one is apt to eat.

When you’re trying to fudge a fact or minimize the unpleasantness of a situation, you’re soft-pedaling.

To be pixilated is to be confusedly crazy; it’s a silly-sounding word (derived from “pixie”) so perhaps best reserved for silly sorts of craziness.

(often dots or squares; the term “pixel” is a portmanteau of “picture” and “element”)

To plumb is to determine depth, as of a body of water, and, by extension, to deeply explore or examine, as in, say, plumbing the horrors of modern warfare.

A plummy speaking voice is too rich, too proper, too self-conscious—that is to say, too-too.

The pokey is the hoosegow, the clink, the slammer, the big house—a prison.

To proscribe is to forbid.

One’s principal is, as well, one’s amassed bank holdings that one aspires not to touch so that one can live entirely on one’s interest. Good luck with that.

To be supine is to be lying on one’s back. To be prone is to be lying on one’s stomach.

“Prophecy” is the noun, “prophesy” the verb.

To be put to the rack, then, is to be tortured, and thus one’s body is racked with pain. One contemplates effortfully by racking one’s brains. A painful cough is a racking one. And an anxiety-inducing experience is nerve-racking. Or is it?

To wrack is to wreck, to destroy. Was that awful hour you spent locked in a room full of rambunctious kindergartners simply nerve-racking, or was it utterly nerve-wracking? Is your moldering ancestral manse going to wrack and ruin, or merely rack and ruin?

To wreak is to cause (in an unnice way) or to inflict. An army wreaks havoc. A storm wreaks damage. The preferred past tense of “wreak,” I should note, is not “wrought” (which is an ancient past tense of “work”; it still turns up in the phrase “wrought iron”) but, simply, “wreaked.”

If one is granted the freedom to make one’s own decisions and run one’s own life, one is given free rein.

To be reluctant is to be resistant, unwilling. To be reticent is to be silent, uncommunicative.

RETCH/WRETCH To retch is to heave, to gag, to nearly vomit. I think it’s wonderful that the English language has a word for “to nearly vomit.”

A wretch is a person on the darker side of the happiness/niceness spectrum, from the muddy gray of the deeply miserable poor unfortunate to the full-tilt blackness of the scoundrel and the miscreant. And the blackguard.

to riffle something is to thumb lightly through

To rifle through something—a room, a desk drawer—is to rummage with criminal intent to steal.

“Sensual” pertains to the physical senses; “sensuous” involves aesthetic matters.

Use “stanch” when you mean to stop the flow of something, as blood from a wound, or to hold something in check, as to stanch the rising violence in a war-torn country.

Stationery is writing paper (and, often included in the idea, the full array of envelopes, pens, pencils, and ink).

Be careful to discern between the adverb (“She insinuated herself subtly into the conversation”) and the noun (“He wheedled money out of his parents with great subtlety”).

To be toothsome is to be tasty; often the term is used to describe things that seem, in anticipation and as yet untasted, to be tasty, as a toothsome morsel. And that sense of anticipatory salivation is why “toothsome” is also applied to people who are sexually appealing, I imagine.

The former means twisty, winding, serpentine; the latter means like torture.

“underway” is an adjective, “under way” an adverb.

As picturesquely funereally evocative as the notion of a “veil of tears” might be, the phrase—going all the way back to Psalm 84—is properly “vale of tears.”

“Venal” means mercenary, bribable, corrupt. “Venial” means pardonable; a venial sin is one that will not send you to hell.

To waver (not to be confused with a waiver, which is a document of relinquishment) is to tremble or to vacillate.

“I don’t know whose books those are.” “Whose” is a pronoun denoting belonging. “Who’s on first?” “Who’s” means “Who is.”

The former is a noun; the latter is a verb. You’re not on the way to the gym to “workout.” You’re on the way to the gym to work out. And to give yourself a workout.

WARREN BUFFETT Billionaire. Not “Buffet,” which would make him a serve-yourself meal. Here’s a head-scratcher, though: Why does no one seem ever to misspell singer Jimmy Buffett’s name?

NOËL COWARD Actor, playwright, composer, lyricist, director, generally busy fellow. The diaeresis—the New Yorker–beloved mark often affectionately but, in this and all other non-German-language cases, inaccurately referred to as an umlaut—is not optional.

Mostly one wants to strike a balance between one’s editorial preferences and the preferences of the people who own the names.

Discerning fans of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit will note, in the show’s opening credits, the eternally incorrect newspaper headline “EASTSIDE RAPIST CAPTURED.”

a junction and not an intersection because the streets meet but do not cross.

there are occasions when idiom outweighs*11 accuracy.

While we’re here: The official name for that G in LaGuardia (or for any midword capital letter, whether it’s the D in MacDonald or the P in iPhone or the S in PlayStation) is “medial capital,” though it may also be called a camel case (or, more self-reflexively, CamelCase) capital.

MIDDLE-EARTH Nerd heaven. Hyphenated, and the “earth” is lowercased.

effrontery.

An intentionally comic misspelling (as “Froot”) is called a cacography.