Bernice Randall

Bernice Randall's guide to the shades of difference between words in everyday English usage seems to be aimed at the "everyday" writer: people who want to write clearly, but who don't see themselves as professional writers or their writing as a skill to be continuously honed. It is, therefore, an odd hybrid of a usage guide (accurately noting that to use "girl" to refer to an adult woman is offensive, and that "disinterested" and "uninterested" are in no way interchangeable) and cultural show more handbook (succinctly describing "Protestant" as a meta-category encompassing many sects, and explaining the difference between "bulls" and "bears" in the context of the stock market).

Randall does, in a workmanlike manner, what she sets out to do, but the people most likely to pick up this book are unlikely to be satisfied by it.

Because it deals, therefore, in broad generalities and clear distinctions rather than with the subtleties and nuances of specific use-cases, it is too blunt an instrument for the working writer . . . unlike, say, the AP Style Book or William and Mary Morris's Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage.

Randall's prose is, itself, serviceable, but no more than that. The explanations lack the scalpel-like precision of Adrian Room's slender Dictionary of Differences, the sense of "deep learning, effortlessly worn" that pervades Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (a book that, to be fair to Randall, she was not even attempting to emulate), or the infectious delight in words that suffuses the works of William Safire, Charles Funk, and Susie Dent. It's unlikely, therefore, to delight the legions of "word nerds" who enjoy such works.

When Is a Pig a Hog?, which will turn 35 next year, also suffers -- as do the once-au-courant essays of Geoff Nunberg from the late 1990s and early 2000s -- from the passage of time. Usage shifts, and (especially in her section of entries on words that describe people) someone carefully following her advice will sound like a minor character from Back to the Future: comprehensible, but antiquated.

Having picked Randall's book up for a few dollars at a library sale, I'll keep it for reference . . . but not (like so many of those listed above) for the simple joy of dipping into. It's not that kind of a book. show less