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

by Benjamin Dreyer

WHOA It’s been rendered online as “woah” so often that one might be persuaded that that’s an acceptable alternate spelling. It is not.

“fewer than” is applied to countable objects (fewer bottles of beer on the wall) and “less than” to what we call exclusively singular nouns (less happiness, less quality) and mass nouns (fewer chips, less guacamole).

’TIL Once again, for the people in the cheap seats: “Till” is a word. “Until” is a word. “Till” is an older word than “until.” They both mean the same thing. There’s no justification whatsoever for the prissyism “ ’til.”

TRY AND If you try and do something, someone will immediately tell you to try to do it, so you might as well just try to do it so no one will yell at you.

“Everyday” is an adjective (“an everyday occurrence”), “every day” an adverb (“I go to work every day”).

A transitive verb doesn’t merely do; it must do to something. One does not merely lay; one lays a thing.*21 I lay my hands on a long-sought volume of poetry. I lay blame on a convenient stooge. I lay (if I am a hen) an egg.*22 What does this mean to you? Well, for a start: If you’re hesitating between “lie” and “lay” and (a) your sentence has a thing to act upon and (b) you can replace the verb you’re in a quandary about with a less confusingly transitive verb like “place,” you need a “lay.” “Lie,” on the other hand, is an intransitive verb. I lie, period. Works for both recumbence and fibbing. No object needed.

to lay present lay I lay the bowl on the table. present participle laying I am laying the bowl on the table. past laid Earlier, I laid the bowl on the table. past participle laid I have laid the bowl on the table. to lie (in the sense of to recline)*23 present lie I lie down. present participle lying Look at me: I am lying down. past lay Yesterday, I lay down. past participle lain Look at me: I have lain down.

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

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. An oracle prophesies a prophecy.

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

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

Strictly differentiating between “each other,” in reference to something occurring between two people, Johnny and I like each other. and “one another,” for three or more,

Into = movement. In = presence.

It takes three to make an “-est.”

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. If you want to explore on your own, make use of the highly searchable books.google.com. If you can’t, with a modicum of effort, find a published source for a quote, the odds are at least reasonable that it’s a sham.

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.

Title case is the convention of capitalizing, in titles of works (books, book chapters, plays, movies—you get the idea) and, often though not always, in newspaper and magazine headlines, the first letter of all the important words. Which are the important words of a title? the first word and the last word all nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs Which are the words that don’t make the capital cut? articles (“a,” “an,” “the”) conjunctions (“and,” “but,” “if,” “or,” etc.)