Bücher von Charles Harrington Elster

Fasten your seat belt for a crash course in careful usage.... Just like automobile accidents, accidents of style occur all over the English-speaking world, in print and on the Internet, thousands of times every day. They range from minor fender benders, such as confusing their and there, to serious smashups, such as misusing sensual for sensuous or writing loathe when you mean loath.Charles Harrington Elster shows you how to navigate the hairpin turns of grammar, diction, spelling, and punctuation with an entertaining driver's manual covering 350 common word hazards and infractions, arranged in order of complexity for writers of all levels. Elster illustrates these surprisingly common accidents with quotations from numerous print and online publications, many of them highly regarded---which perhaps should make us feel better: If the horrendous redundancy close proximity and the odious construction what it is, is have appeared in The New York Times, maybe our own accidents will be forgiven. But that shouldn't keep us from aspiring to accident-free writing and speaking. If you want to get on the road to writing well, The Accidents of Style will help you drive home what you want to say.

Are you so sure about "assure," "ensure," and "insure"? Can you determine whether a knob of butter is equivalent to a lump or a pat or a scosh? Can you say which word in the English language has the most definitions, or who put the H in Jesus H. Christ? If you can't, be assured that Charles Harrington Elster, author of several well-loved works on language, can-and does in his latest book, a delightfully designed compendium of the most common, interesting, and entertaining conundrums in our language. Drawing upon esoteric sources and his own inimitable expertise, Elster uses a lively question-and-answer format to cover a variety of topics-word and phrase origins, slang, style, usage, punctuation, and pronunciation. Every chapter features original brainteasers, challenging puzzles, and a trove of literary trivia.

Test of Time is a captivating time-travel adventure that incorporates vocabulary words from the SAT and ACT, boldfacing them throughout the novel and providing definitions in a handy back-of-the book glossary. The result is a fun and effective study method for the thousands of diligent students who take these tests each year. For Orlando Garcia Ortiz and his friends at prestigious Hadleyburg University, it's finals week. That same week, but many, many years before, a famously eccentric writer in Hartford, Connecticut, is putting the finishing touches on a manuscript about a rebellious boy named Huck. Suddenly, a bizarre thing happens: The manuscript disappears and in its place appears a strange contraption-a college student's laptop that has traveled through time. It's a mysterious set of circumstances, but our intrepid heroes at Hadleyburg, joined by Mark Twain, endeavor to retrieve their valued possessions and return to their proper places in time.

Here's an irresistible invitation to discover a treasure trove of exceptional words you can use to add sophistication to your vocabulary and charm to your repartee. Consider that without realizing it you may have engaged in acokoinonia (sex without passion or desire), been bored to tears by the company of a philodox (someone in love with his or her opinions), or suffered from recurrent matutolypea (getting up on the wrong side of the bed). Presented with panache by the language connoisseur whom William Safire calls "ek-STROR-di-ner-ee," There's a Word for It will add a dash of wit to your daily life -- lest anyone mistake you for a sumph (stupid oaf) or fritlag (a good-for-nothing).