By Dick Moss
I suppose only a copy editor would consider flipping through a usage book a form of entertainment, but I get a kick out of it. Seeing where various ones differ and where they agree can be highly instructive.

Bryan A. Garner’s “A Dictionary of Modern American Usage"  has become one of my favorites in just a few years. It has little of the wit of Bill Walsh’s “Lapsing into a Comma” or Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s books. But what it lacks in humor it makes up for in breadth. If you have a grammar question, you’re likely to find an answer to it in this reference work.

Garner strikes a good balance between the loose (if not entirely nonexistent) guidelines of  “Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage” and some of the stricter sources. He differentiates between formal and informal uses and is careful to note when an informal usage is catching up on a formal one, as is happening with increasing frequency.

“Modern American Usage” is up-to-date enough to drop the hyphen out of teenager – why AP
remains attached to that one is beyond me. Yet it is strict enough to condemn “normalcy,”
one of the current crisis’s buzzwords, as a “needless variant.”

I also value Garner’s book for its reliance on relatively recent citations from U.S. newspapers and magazines for his examples. They help put the abstract grammatical question, which can be hard for some to apply, into a practical and understandable context.

Not all his entries hit the mark, at least not in my eyes. He would, for example, allow the use of entitle in the sense of “to give a title to” rather than reserving it for “to provide with a right or title to something.”

Finding little points like that to quibble about is half the entertainment value of flipping through a book like Garner’s. On the whole, though, I find little to quibble about in it. I readily admit that’s one of the reasons I enjoy it so much.
Dick Moss  is the copy desk chief of the Rochester, N.Y., Democrat and Chronicle