Reviewed by: BigAl
Genre: Non-Fiction
Approximate word count: 100-105,000 words
Availability
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Author:
A former
journalist, publisher, and “coffee house poet,” Richard Marsh is the author of
several books ranging from novels, to poetry, to non-fiction like this one.
For more,
visit the author’s website.
Description:
The English
language doesn’t have a body governing what is and isn’t correct usage. Its
nature is to change and evolve. That is both good (it makes the language
adaptable to new words or for the meaning of a word to expand and evolve when needed
due to a changing world) and bad, causing existing words with precise meanings
to, through what the author calls “Contraction and Bleaching,” lose meaning and
precision.
English Like It Is is a reference, of sorts. It isn’t
a comprehensive usage guide, instead focusing mainly on words and phrases where
the meaning as actually used is changing, sometimes for the better and
sometimes not.
Appraisal:
I have
friends who think I’m a grammar nerd. I guess objecting to a comment on
facebook that says something like “there gong too be out of my site soon,” is
too fussy. Maybe I am, but if so I’m just an apprentice or
grammar-nerd-in-training. Perusing English
Like It Is drove that home for me.
Each entry
in this book focuses on a specific subject, usually a single word, collection
of related words, or a saying, and explores how it is used and misused. Each
section discusses proper usage, common mistakes, and has examples from some
major newspapers in the UK of the word being used in context, both correctly
and not.
That the
incorrect examples are so plentiful from sources where the example was composed
by a professional wordsmith and approved by an editor who is presumably a
expert on such things (the true grammar nerds) shows how hard it is to achieve
perfection. But for the grammar-nerd-in-training, this volume should help.
Format/Typo Issues:
No
significant issues.
Rating: **** Four stars
4 comments:
Nothing wrong with a grammar nerd. :)
Of course you would claim that, Karen. :)
This sounds like a great asset for authors.
Edge of Your Seat Romance
"Nothing wrong with a grammar nerd. :)"
Grammar nerds… imagine where we'd be without them. :-)
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