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October 26, 2024 - April 21, 2025
There’s no reason to retroapply the trademark to vehicles that predate it.
Q-TIPS The generic term is “cotton swabs,” and Unilever personnel are mighty proprietary about their trademark. Did you know that the Q stands for “Quality”?
SHEETROCK Or opt for the generic “plasterboard,” “drywall,” or “wallboard.”
Those items we layfolk often refer to as styrofoam cups and styrofoam coolers are in fact not made of Styrofoam at all.
XBOX Not X-Box or XBox.
The people*23 convicted of and executed for witchcraft in late-seventeenth-century colonial Massachusetts were not burned at the stake, as one persistently sees asserted, but hanged. The accused Giles Corey, who refused to plead to charges one way or the other, was, grotesquely, tortured to death as stones were piled on him. His defiant last words were, we’re told, “More weight.”
DEFCON 5 is “I have a hangnail, but otherwise everything is fine.” DEFCON 1 is “We’re all about to die.” There is no such thing as DEFCON 8, DEFCON 12, etc.
assless chaps The garment, that is. Not fellows lacking in dorsal embonpoint. I’m not sure how often this will come up in your writing—or in your life—but chaps are, by definition, assless. Look at a cowboy. From behind.
ATM = automated teller machine, which, one might argue and win the argument, is redundant enough as it is.
free gift A classic of the redundancy genre, much beloved of retailers and advertisers.
A frontispiece is an illustration immediately preceding, and generally facing, a book’s title page.
full gamut A gamut is the full range or scope of something, so the word needs no modifier. Ditto “complete range,” “broad spectrum,” “full extent,” and their cousins.
hourly (or daily or weekly or monthly or yearly) basis
knots per hour One knot = one nautical mile per hour.
Mount Fujiyama As we note that yama means “mountain,” we also note that we can refer to Fujiyama or to Mount Fuji.
“midnight” and “noon” are all you need to say.
“Undergraduate” is an excellent noun. No need to use it as an adjective to modify itself.
Q. What’s the most redundant redundancy you’ve ever encountered? A. I recall it as if it were yesterday: “He implied without quite saying.” I was so filled with delight on encountering that, I scarcely had the heart to cross out “without quite saying” and to note in the margin, politely and succinctly, “BY DEF.” But I did it anyway.
“Retronym” is a term coined by the journalist Frank Mankiewicz in 1980 to identify a new term coined to replace a term whose meaning, once clear, has become clouded or outmoded, often by some technological advance. For instance: What was once simply a watch became, with the invention of digital watches, an analog watch. Ordinary guitars were dubbed, after the electric ones showed up, acoustic guitars. No one ever referred to a landline till mobile phones became the thing. Closer to home, one had no cause to refer to a hardcover book till paperbacks were invented, nor to refer to a mass-market
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Here’s a fun weird thing: The word “namesake” works in both directions. That is, if you were named after your grandfather, you are his namesake. He is also yours. Who knew.
It takes three to make an “-est.” Except, English being English, in the phrase “best foot forward.”
If you love something passionately and vigorously, you love it no end. To love something “to no end,” as one often sees it rendered, would be to love it pointlessly. If that’s what you mean, then OK.
“If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.” —ALBERT EINSTEIN As Dickey then himself tweeted, “That Einstein never said any such thing only makes this tweet that much more perfect.”
Wikiquote, with individual entries for just about everyone who ever picked up a pen, not only lists a writer’s greatest hits but helpfully links you to the published sources of said hits and, perhaps even more helpfully, includes reliable sections on disputed and misattributed quotes.
I also commend to you the work of the doggedly thorough Garson O’Toole, who runs the Quote Investigator website (access it via quoteinvestigator.com, to be sure) and tweets as @QuoteResearch, and who specializes in not only debunking fake or misattributed quotes but time-traveling backward through the archives to discern, if he can, how and when the fakeries and misattributions first occurred.
The cleverer people endorse lowercasing the shorter prepositions, of which there are many, including “at,” “by,” “but,” “from,” “into,” “of,” “to,” and “with,” and capping the longer ones, like “despite,” “during,” and “toward.”
“When in doubt, do what your eye tells you to do,” that’s nevertheless what I’m saying. And when someone attempts to correct you, look that person square in the eye and say, “I’m using it as an adverb,” then walk away quickly. Works every time.
phrasal verb,
You don’t tow the line. You toe it.
It is, rather, “deep-seated.”
Brussels sprouts.
“Stupider” and “stupidest” are too words.
There’s no last word, only the next word.
Beyond the sources of information already mentioned throughout, I commend to you: Theodore Bernstein’s Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins, one of the charmingest, smartest, most readable books on the subject of language I’ve ever read and these exceptionally erudite, eminently bookmarkable sites, to which I return over and over: Grammarist (grammarist.com) Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman’s Grammarphobia (grammarphobia.com) Jonathon Owen’s Arrant Pedantry (arrantpedantry.com) Kory Stamper’s Harmless Drudgery (korystamper.wordpress.com) Online Etymology Dictionary (etymonline.com) Mignon
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