Last weekend, I visited my dad, sister, and her family to celebrate Christmas a bit early. Among the presents I received was Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, which I have coveted for some time but have never ponied up and bought for myself. For a word nerd, owning a book like this is roughly equivalent to a sports fan’s owning a bunch of extra sports channels on TV. The book reads, not surprisingly, essentially like a dictionary, and it comes complete with guide words at the tops of the pages and thousands of entries about things ranging from the fact that “incommunicative” is a needless variant of “uncommunicative” to the proper pronunciation of “pubes.” If there’s a usage problem for which you can never remember the rule, chances are very good that this book covers it.
I promise I’ll try not to pull my posts…
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Commonplace book? 