How to Tell Fate from Destiny: And Other Skillful Word Distinctions

by Charles Harrington Elster

Overview

“In this part-thesaurus, part-hilarious manual of style, Elster breaks down the most common mistakes of the English language.”—Booklist
 
If you have trouble distinguishing the verbs imitate and emulate, the relative pronouns that and which, or the adjectives pliant, pliable, and supple, never fear—How to Tell Fate from Destiny is here to help! With more than 500 headwords, the book is replete with advice on how to differentiate commonly confused words and steer clear of verbal trouble. Whether you’re a boomer, a Gen-Xer, or a millennial, if you peruse, browse, or even skim these spindrift pages you will (not shall) become versed in the fine art of differentiation. You will learn, for example,

• how to tell whether you suffer from pride, vanity, or hubris
• how to tell whether you’re contagious or infectious
• how to tell if you’re pitiful or pitiable
• how to tell if you’re self-centered or self-absorbed
• how to live an ethical life in a moral universe

“This appealing book will help readers over countless lexical stumbling blocks, and encourage clearer and more precise speaking and writing.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“The author of this charming and useful book has made a career out of literary finesse. In his latest effort to ‘clarify the mind and general discourse,’ the ‘professional distinctioneer’ offers witty, wise advice on the right way to deploy some of the English language’s trickiest words, from a and an to zero, zeros, zeroes.”—Yale Alumni Magazine

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781328583239
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	06/11/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	323
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Charles Harrington Elster is a writer, broadcaster, and logophilea lover of words. He is the author and narrator of the audio vocabulary-building program Verbal Advantage and the book by the same name. His other books include Tooth and Nail and Test of Time, vocabulary-building novels for high school students preparing to take the college entrance exams; Theres a Word for It, a lighthearted look at unusualand unusually usefulwords; and The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, among others. Charlie was born in New York City in 1957 and earned his BA cum laude from Yale in 1981. He lives in San Diego with his wife and two daughters.

Editorial Reviews

06/18/2018
Elster’s entertaining and instructive resource offers helpful suggestions for distinguishing between words often misused in conversation or writing. Elster points out that even professionals are vulnerable to error, as in this quote from the Guardian: “Tweets are stored on the device so you can keep reading even if you loose your phone signal.” In each of the book’s alphabetical entries, he includes two or more words that are confused, accompanied by clear examples and detailed explanations of the distinction between them. For instance, he writes, “to convince” means to “make someone believe something,” while “to persuade” means “to make someone take action.” The book includes entries both for words commonly used in conversation or writing—such as “amount, number”; “its, it’s”—and for those less commonly used— “capacious, commodious”; “auger, augur.” Elster can be cheeky, as when he decries the use of “empathy” as a “trendy substitute” for “sympathy”: “sympathy is what you should feel for someone who displays a flashy word when an ordinary one is called for. Empathy is what you should feel when you’ve been making the same stupid mistake yourself.” This appealing book will help readers over countless lexical stumbling blocks, and encourage clearer and more precise speaking and writing. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly