About the Author:
Kathryn Petras & Ross Petras, a sister-and-brother writing team, are the authors of many non-fiction books including the New York Times bestseller You’re Saying It Wrong, and compilers of the bestselling page-a-day calendar The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said (with over 4.8 million copies sold) and its counterpart The 365 Smartest Things Ever Said. Their work has received the attention of, or has been featured in, diverse media outlets including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Bustle, The Atlantic, the London Times, and McSweeney’s. They have also been guests on hundreds of radio and tv shows, including Good Morning America, CNN, Fox & Friends, and NPR’s Here and Now. They are currently working on a podcast for NPR affiliate KMUW entitled You’re Saying It Wrong.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
INTRODUCTION
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
—ANNE CARSON, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED
This book is about words that aren’t doing what they want to do because we’re not letting them. It’s really a word liberation book—letting those words be the words they were meant to be.
It’s about how we misuse the English language and use the wrong words that don’t mean what we think they mean. It’s not only about mistakes, but about correcting those mistakes, and discussing if they’re even mistakes at all. In short, it’s about the 150 most commonly confused, abused, questioned, and misused words and phrases in the English language, according to surveys, dictionaries like Merriam-Webster’s, usage panels like the American Heritage panel, and top word experts like Steven Pinker and Bryan Garner. Each entry includes examples of word misuse from the media along with short histories of how and why these mistakes have happened, as well as some of the (often surprisingly nasty) debates about which uses are mistakes, which aren’t, and, finally, how to use these words correctly.
These are the words that educated people most often misuse, are embarrassed about misusing, and want to use correctly. Some of them are what are sometimes called bubble words— words of which you are sure you know the meaning, but you actually don’t. Others are homophones —members of the always confusing sound-alike- but- mean- different group. Still others are paronyms, or what some people more colloquially call “confusables” because,
yes, they’re confusing on account of they sound similar (like mitigate and militate or discomfit and discomfort) but yet again mean different things.
These are all different forms of catachresis —the technical term for saying something that doesn’t mean what you think it means.
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