One of the English languages most skilled and beloved writers guides us all toward precise mistakefree grammar. As usual Bill Bryson says it best English is a dazzlingly idiosyncratic tongue full of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense. This is a language where cleave can mean to cut in half or to hold two halves together where the simple word set has 126 different meanings as a verb 58 as a noun and 10 as a participial adjective where if you can run fast you are moving swiftly but if you are stuck fast you are not moving at all and where colonel freight once and ache are strikingly at odds with their spellings. As a copy editor for the London Times in the early 1980s Bill Bryson felt keenly the lack of an easytoconsult authoritative guide to avoiding the traps and snares in English and so he brashly suggested to a publisher that he should write one. Surprisingly the proposition was accepted and for a sum of money carefully gauged not to cause embarrassment or feelings of overworth he proceeded to write that bookhis first inaugurating his stellar career. Now a decade and a half later revised updated and thoroughly but not overly Americanized it has become Brysons Dictionary of Troublesome Words more than ever an essential guide to the wonderfully disordered thing that is the English language. With some one thousand entries from a an to zoom that feature realworld examples of questionable usage from an international array of publications and with a helpful glossary and guide to pronunciation this precise prescriptive andbecause it is written by Bill Brysonoften witty book belongs on the desk of every person who cares enough about the language not to maul or misuse or distort it. show more