If you can endure a metaphor stretched beyond its limits through more than 250 pages of text, you're ready for Charles Harrington Elster's latest book on writing style. It is not, however, a style book as in an organized guide like the AP or either of the MLAs in which you can look up punctuation "rules" and correct usage. The entries (there are no chapters) have whimsical titles like "Not everything is major" and the word "major" appears in the index, but how would you know to look for it?
Elster's Accidents of Style is yet another book that writers might enjoy reading for fun, but beginners will find of little use. By the end, they will be thoroughly confused about the meaning and even the spelling of "wreckless" and "reckless." The careful writer/driver aims to be "wreckless" as in having no accidents. The reckless driver/writer, on the other hand, will tumble into the potholes and pitfalls that Elster points out. So he says.
Some of those roadblocks, perhaps only the author perceives and points out. If they are online and indexed by Google, they are candidates. (I discount any cited source containing the term "wiki"). Consulting how many returns the search engine yielded for many of the entries must have made child's play of the research part of writing this book. It also padded out the 350 entries, which appear in no particular order, ending with a soliloquy on "who and whom." That particular entry concludes:
So, don't be afraid to use who when it comes naturally to you and whom seems unidiomatic. But also be mindful that whom still plays a role in the language that should be respected.
An Introduction that presents catachresis as a jumped up way to say solecism does not seem to be a progression of "increasing complexity from the rudiments to the punctilios," as stated in A Note to the Reader. (That's from page five, where we also meet peripatetic, affable and cicerone.)
Article comments