The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage And Style - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618604995 ISBN 13: 9780618604999

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1815

Synopsis

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of modern English language usage, grammar, and style is organized in an easy-to-use A-to-Z listing featuring some 1,500 entries that demonstrate correct and incorrect usage with examples and quotations and provide guidelines on punctuation, capitalization, and other style conventions.

About this title

About the Author:

The Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries and of other reference titles published by Houghton Mifflin Company are trained lexicographers with a varied array of interests and expertise. Most of the editors hold graduate degrees and have studied at least one foreign language. Several have degrees in linguistics or in the history of the English language. Others have degrees in science or sometimes other disciplines. All the editors familiarize themselves with the vocabulary in specific subject areas, collect materials on new developments and usage, and work in association with consultants to ensure that the content of our publications is as accurate and as up-to-date as possible.

From Booklist:

In this age when Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org] and Wiktionary [http://en.wiktionary.org] allow anyone to be a self-appointed subject expert or lexicographer, The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style acknowledges the inexorable force of popular usage while it also honors canonical authority. Drawing on the authoritative knowledge of its lexicographers and the considered collective judgment of a panel of noted writers, the book offers guidance on the simple (the pronunciations of bouquet); the perplexingly redundant (free gift); the often imprecisely used (impeach); the no longer distinct (healthful/healthy); the needless but persistent (irregardless); the easily confused (stationary/stationery); the unfortunately conflated (lay/lie); and many more pitfalls. Articles embodying the precision and lucidity of dictionary definitions explain the history of a word's or expression's usage issue, how and why the issue exists, and the preferred usage. Advice on acceptable usage in informal language such as daily speech and recommended usage in formal language such as writing often differ. Examples from newspapers, literature, and Web sites as well as reports of the usage panel's responses bolster the explanations. Entries such as lady/ladylike testify to the potent influence that gender issues and sexual politics have had on usage. The he/she entry even offers ways to avoid the generic he. The Guide also includes entries on grammar issues such as absolute constructions, the double passive, nominative case, plural nouns, and the subjunctive.

With fewer entries but a more popular touch, this complements Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage (Oxford, 1998) and Pam Peters' international Cambridge Guide to English Usage (Cambridge, 2004). None of them, however, address usage issues in the newest form of written English--text messaging, that rapidly evolving telegraphic electronic communication medium in which numerals can be words and English words can be vowel-less. That guide will undoubtedly have more in common in spirit and, undoubtedly, in medium with Wiktionary and Wikipedia than with any printed usage guide. James Rettig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1815
• ISBN 10: 0618604995
• ISBN 13: 9780618604999
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512
• Editor: American Heritage Diction