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

by Benjamin Dreyer

“Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.”

RESTAURATEUR It’s not “restauranteur,” and the floor is not open to debate.

Oh, and this is crucial: The important thing to remember about peeves and crotchets is that your own peeves and crotchets reflect sensible preferences based on a refined appreciation of the music and meaning of the English language, and that everyone else’s are the products of diseased minds.

DECIMATE There are those who would use “decimate” only to describe the punishment by death of one in ten—not one in nine, not one in eleven—mutinous soldiers. There are those who would use it to describe, generally, destruction. The latter group certainly gets more use out of the word.

For instance, from the irresistibly quotable The Importance of Being Earnest: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”

“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,’

for decades copy editors have amused themselves, if no one else, by styling his name as Harry S Truman.

DR PEPPER The absence of a period in the name of this soda pop is much discussed at copyediting bacchanals.

embonpoint.

I think perhaps you don’t finish writing a book. You stop writing it.

there is no last word. There’s no rule without an exception (well, mostly), there’s no thought without an afterthought (at least for me), there’s always something you meant to say but forgot to say. There’s no last word, only the next word.