I am lucky.
Today Tim e-mails me at work to say I have surprise waiting for me at home. I half expect some yummy dark chocolate or my favorite guilty pleasure, Coke Zero (I know).
My surprises are better than chocolate and diet soda (which actually go very well together, I’m embarassed to admit). No, Tim has two things which will last longer than a fleeting bite of bittersweet chocolate: books!
Tim knows that part of my freedom dream involves writing, and he found two books on the subject at one of our local used bookshops (how lucky are we to have more than one?!):
Writing for Journalists by Wynford Hicks
and
Troublesome Words by Bill Bryson
The first is a practical guide on writing news, features, and reviews.
Troublesome Words is a dictionary of confusing words and concepts in the English language. Here’s one:
decimate. Literally the word means to reduce by a tenth (from the ancient practice of punishing the mutinous or cowardly by killing every tenth man). By extension it may be used to describe the inflicting of heavy damage, but it should never be used to denote annihilation, as in this memorably excruciating sentence cited by Fowler: ‘Dick, hotly pursued by the scalp-hunter, turned in his saddle, fired and literally decimated his opponent’. Equally to be avoided are context in which the word’s use is clearly inconsistent with its literal meaning, as in ‘Frost decimated an estimated 80 per cent of the crops’.
No entry on “dethaw”, though, which is my favorite blunder:
“Can you dethaw some beans from the freezer?”
Related posts:
Do you remember a post a LONG LONG time ago where you had a link to a guy who had something like the “top 100 tips” for better writing…?…
(one of them being never to use …?… and the other must concern the use of “being never”)
oh my.