Garner's Modern English Usage (5th edition)

"by Bryan Garner Bryan Garner is considered a traditional prescriptivist in the so-called Usage Wars. But he is the best of the bunch. While he is unafraid of condemning a usage as “wrong”, every entry in his book has a 5-point scale, which allows him to be more subtle than that: “mostly wrong” or “nearly acceptable”. Second, he uses a deep well of citations to buttress his claims. Third, the latest edition makes use of the vast data from Google Books, so he can find out whether a usage is growing or receding, common or rare. That has even, in a small few instances, changed his rulings from previous editions. (Never trust a person who won’t change their mind no matter what the evidence.) As a relatively conservative volume, this is the book you turn to for advice that will help you avoid annoying the most hardened sticklers. But Garner has no truck with fake rules like the prohibition of split infinitives."

"This grammar book is the closest thing Americans have to a national authority. There’s an array of books that fill this niche; in England the O xford English Dictionary might be the equivalent. Garner’s Modern American Usage just has this weight of authority to it. It is very carefully organised and prepared. It is very well written. The author is very well respected as a kind of arbiter of effective written communication. I just find it a great resource for making decisions about which word is most effective in conveying what I want to communicate to my audience. There’s a habit, in American English at least, of using the word ‘bicep’ as if biceps is a plural and bicep is the singular. But ‘biceps’ is actually a singular noun, it just happens to have an ‘s’ at the end because it is based on the Latin , and Latin does that sometimes. So Garner will tell you that if you want to be considered a careful writer, if you want people to respect you as an authority when you are writing, then you are not going to talk about your left ‘bicep,’ you are going to talk about your left ‘biceps.’ It gets into that laser-like level of detail about the right thing to do if you want people to feel that they can trust you. There is a concept called ‘linguistic register,’ which is a fancy way of saying how formally you write (or speak). When you are preparing a business report or writing for a scientific journal, the way you write is intrinsic to how well you are perceived as an authority and how persuasive your argument is. If you are writing a blog, and you write about how something is ‘hella’ cool, if your blog is engaging with people on a conversational level, that’s an appropriate linguistic register. Or if you use the word ‘phat.’ Are you familiar with that? It’s from rap culture, and it means ‘great!’ ‘That’s phat, man, that’s phat!’ It’s a dated term, but if your audience knows what that means, then you can be ‘sloppy’ because you are still communicating effectively. Do you know the term for that? It’s called the ‘greengrocer’s apostrophe,’ and actually originates in the United Kingdom. It’s called that because the mistake is so ubiquitous in storefront signs, where it’ll say ‘Apple’s for Sale’ because the person who wrote it doesn’t know the function of the apostrophe. Unfortunately, that error is also common in other contexts, and it’s hella bad. It depends on who I am writing or editing for because they are both correct. They’re just alternative forms — just like American English and British English are both valid in their own contexts. Some publications prefer the terminal s and some publications prefer to omit it. It depends on which style you are using. But it’s confusing because a layperson will be reading a newspaper and they’ll see Jones’ with just an apostrophe. Then they’ll read a book and see Jones’s with apostrophe s. They’ll wonder which one is wrong because they don’t know the distinction. They don’t know that it can be either. The best way to think about it is as two separate languages. It’s almost like French and Italian, or maybe it would be more accurate to say the difference between two French dialects —Provençal or Occitan. Or between Portuguese in Portugal and Portuguese in Brazil. I’ve actually edited British English and it can be quite confusing. For example, the use of ‘ise’ or ‘ize’ or the use of ‘ise’ or ‘ice’ at the end of a word like ‘practice.’ It can get confusing for an American because we just do it the same way every time. The British don’t. A similar case is whether you place terminal punctuation inside or outside of a quotation mark. In British English, it varies and not only that, but some British publications follow American style and some follow British style. So you just have to know which rulebook you are supposed to use, when you work, as I do, as an editor. He comes across as a bit stuffy, but he is one of those people who is stuffy and yet witty — droll, I guess you would say. Sometimes, his humour is droll or dry, but his writing style is basically do-what-you’re-told. He is confident in his writing: ‘If you are opening up this book, you are in my grasp and I am telling you what to do. Do it.’ It’s a great approach because the reason I’m opening this book is because I’m confused or uncertain about something and I want authoritative advice. Just as with any authority, you accumulate authority. You start out being just another person casting about in the darkness, and then you become the light yourself. He was editor in chief of a law dictionary, Black’s Law Dictionary , and then he started branching out to general-purpose language usage. He is an ultimate arbiter. His is one brand of many that are possible. I just happen to prefer him, which is the case for all the books that I chose for this exercise."