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056b2bb
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shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally
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Bill Bryson |
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bb387f8
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My favourite animal disappearance story, however, harks back to a somewhat earlier age. It concerns a nineteenth-century naturalist named Gerard Krefft, who in 1857 caught two very rare pig-footed bandicoots. Unfortunately for science and for the bandicoots, Krefft soon afterwards grew hungry and ate them. They were, as far as anyone can tell, the last of the species. Certainly none has been seen since. Krefft, incidentally, was later appoi..
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Bill Bryson |
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448dfa4
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A mesma ignorancia predominou em relacao a muitas criaturas maiores, inclusive um dos mais importantes e menos compreendidos de todos os animais que por vezes se encontram nas casas modernas: o morcego. Quase ninguem gosta dos morcegos, o que e lamentavel, porque eles fazem muito mais bem do que mal. Comem grandes quantidades de insetos, beneficiando as plantacoes e o ser humano. O morcego marrom, a especie mais comum nos Estados Unidos, co..
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Bill Bryson |
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dac5758
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In 1956, while passing through customs at Sydney Airport, he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus, by one of life's small ironies, he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection.
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Bill Bryson |
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0d617b5
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disinterested, uninterested. 'Gerulaitis, after appearing almost disinterested in the first set, took a 5-1 lead in the second' (The New York Times). A participant in a tennis match might appear uninterested, but he would be unlikely to be disinterested, which means neutral and impartial. A disinterested person is one who has no stake in the outcome of an event; an uninterested person is one who doesn't care. As with DISCOMFIT and DISCOMFOR..
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Bill Bryson |
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6621de1
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Just beyond the edge of our property in 1985 a farmer crossing a field found a rare, impossible-to-misconstrue Roman phallic pendant. To me this was, and remains, an amazement: the idea of a man in a toga, standing on what is now the edge of my land, patting himself all over, and realizing with consternation that he has lost his treasured keepsake, which then lay in the soil for seventeen or eighteen centuries - through endless generations ..
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humorous
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Bill Bryson |
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c615300
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Finally, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, rose to speak. Wilberforce had been briefed (or so it is generally assumed) by the ardent anti-Darwinian Richard Owen, who had been a guest in his home the night before. As nearly always with events that end in uproar, accounts of what exactly transpired vary widely. In the most popular version, Wilberforce, when properly in flow, turned to Huxley with a dry smile and demanded of him whethe..
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Bill Bryson |
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94391dd
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nemesis. 'Instead, the unions directed their wrath toward another nemesis, the European Community's Executive Commission ...' (Time magazine). A nemesis (from Nemesis, the Greek goddess of vengeance) is not merely a rival or traditional enemy, but one who extracts retributive justice or is utterly unbeatable.
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Bill Bryson |
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5e3da39
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Vince was notorious. He would easily have been the world's most terrifying human had he but been human. I don't know quite what he was, other than it was five feet six inches of wiry malevolence in a grubby T-shirt. Reliable rumor had it that he had not been born, but burst fully formed from his mother's belly and then skittered off to the sewers.
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Bill Bryson |
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ac137f1
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The U.S. Army in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during a survey of soldiers' dietary preferences. Although no such food existed, funistrada ranked higher in the survey than lima beans and eggplant (which seems about right to me, at least as far as the lima beans go).
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Bill Bryson |
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e972478
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He had a boyish enthusiasm for warfare and was delighted beyond words to be made a colonel in the Illinois National Guard without ever having done anything to merit it other than to exist as a rich person.
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Bill Bryson |
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b85460a
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Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international dateline.
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Bill Bryson |
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3853500
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Where the British will say howjado for "how do you do," an American will say jeetjet for "have you taken sustenance recently?" and lesskweet for "in that case, let us retire to a convivial place for a spot of refreshment."
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Bill Bryson |
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47009a9
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Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between.
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Bill Bryson |
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a04db15
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When each precedes the noun or pronoun to which it refers, the verb should be singular: 'Each of us was ...'. When it follows the noun or pronoun, the verb should be plural: 'We each were ...'. Each not only influences the number of the verb, it also influences the number of later nouns and pronouns. In simpler terms, if each precedes the verb, subsequent nouns and pronouns should be plural (e.g., 'They each are subject to sentences of five..
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Bill Bryson |
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exception proves the rule, the. A widely misunderstood expression. As a moment's thought should confirm, it isn't possible for an exception to confirm a rule - but then that isn't the sense that was originally intended. Prove here is a 'fossil' - that is, a word or phrase that is now meaningless except within the confines of certain sayings ('hem and haw', 'rank and file' and 'to and fro' are other fossil expressions). Originally prove mean..
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Bill Bryson |
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99c1a04
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past. Often a space-waster, as in this example: 'She has been a teacher at the school for the past 20 years' (Independent). In this sentence, and in countless others like it, 'the past' could be deleted without any loss of sense.
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Bill Bryson |
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8573d78
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of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos,
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Bill Bryson |
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period of time. A curiously irresistible expression for many writers, as here: 'Marcos claimed that the seizures could be expected to continue for a considerable period of time' (Sunday Times). Make it either 'a considerable period' or 'a considerable time'. Both together are unnecessary.
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Bill Bryson |
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d951e4d
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A. L. Rowse--who, it must be said, never allowed an absence of certainty to get in the way of a conclusion--in 1973 identified the dark lady as Emilia Bassano, daughter of one of the queen's musicians, and, with a certain thrust of literary jaw, asserted that his conclusions "cannot be impugned, for they are the answer," even though they are unsupported by anything that might reasonably be termed proof."
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Bill Bryson |
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a527247
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different. Often used unnecessarily. 'He plays milkmaid to more than 50 different species of poisonous snake' (Observer); 'The phenomenally successful Rubik Cube, which has 43,252,002,274,489,856,000 different permutations but only one solution' (Sunday Times); '[He] published at least five different books on grammar' (Simon, Paradigms Lost). Frequently, as in each of these examples, it can be deleted without loss.
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Bill Bryson |
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3a7b3ee
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personal, personally. When it is necessary to emphasize that a person is acting on his own rather than as a spokesman or that he is addressing people individually rather than collectively, personal and personally are unexceptionable. But usually the context makes that clear and the word is used without purpose, as it was here: 'Dr Leonard has decided to visit personally the Oklahoma parish which is the centre of the dispute ...' (Daily Tele..
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Bill Bryson |
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efa3a6f
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When Jefferson's father died in 1757, he left a library of forty-two books, and that was regarded as pretty impressive. A library of four hundred books--the number that John Harvard left at his death--was considered so colossal that they named Harvard College after him. Over the course of his life, Harvard had acquired books at the rate of about twelve a year.
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Bill Bryson |
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bc47b35
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dilemma. 'The chief dilemma facing Mr Greenspan is whether or not to raise interest rates' (Sunday Times). Dilemma does not mean just any difficulty or predicament. Strictly speaking, it applies only when someone is faced with two courses of action, both unsatisfactory. Fowler accepted its extension to contexts involving more than two alternatives, but even then the number of alternatives should be definite and the consequences of each unap..
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Bill Bryson |
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5707552
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When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.
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Bill Bryson |
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f695774
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lifelong. 'Jesse Bishop was a lifelong drug addict who had spent 20 of his 46 years in prison' (Guardian). You might be a lifelong resident of New York or a lifelong church-goer or, at a stretch, a lifelong lover of music. But unless the unfortunate Mr Bishop had turned to drugs at a remarkably early age, lifelong is much too literal a word to describe his addiction.
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Bill Bryson |
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dfa7c25
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hanged. 'It was disclosed that a young white official had been found hanged to death in his cell ...' (The New York Times). 'Hanged to death' is redundant. So too, for that matter, are 'starved to death' and 'strangled to death'. The writer was correct, however, in saying that the official had been found hanged and not hung. People are hanged; pictures and the like are hung.
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Bill Bryson |
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0daccea
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affinity denotes a mutual relationship. Therefore, strictly speaking, one should not speak of someone or something having an affinity for another, but rather should speak of an affinity with or between. When mutuality is not intended, 'sympathy' would be a better word. But it should also be noted that a number of authorities and many dictionaries no longer insist on this distinction.
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Bill Bryson |
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3d38cc8
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Kisumu has the distinction of being the poorest city in Kenya. Almost half the people live on fifty cents a day or less.
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Bill Bryson |
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88e837b
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We had come to see the work of Wedco, a small bank - micro-finance institution is the formal term - that has been one of CARE's great success stories in the region. Wedco began in 1989 with the idea of making small loans to groups of ladies, generally market traders, who previously had almost no access to business credit. The idea was that half a dozen or so female traders would form a business club and take out a small loan, which they wou..
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Bill Bryson |
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10a34f8
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head over heels is not just a cliche; it is also, when you think about it, a faintly absurd one. Our heads are usually over our heels.
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Bill Bryson |
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8251191
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Newton was a decidedly odd figure - brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. He built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once..
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Bill Bryson |
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e1d6354
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all intents and purposes is colourless, redundant and hackneyed. Almost any other expression would be an improvement. 'He is, to all intents and purposes, king of the island' (Mail on Sunday) would be instantly made better by changing the central phrase to 'in effect' or removing it altogether. If the phrase must be used at all, it can always be shorn of the last two words. 'To all intents' says as much as 'to all intents and purposes'.
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Bill Bryson |
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b9d4bf9
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For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees.
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Bill Bryson |
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346e19a
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Hobson's choice is sometimes taken to mean a dilemma or difficult decision, but in fact means no choice at all. It derives from a sixteenth-century Cambridge stable-keeper named Thomas Hobson, who hired out horses on a strict rotation. The customer was allowed to take the one nearest the stable door or none at all.
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Bill Bryson |
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9937f38
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There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other properties on which our existence hinges.
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Bill Bryson |
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5ebba31
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Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.
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Bill Bryson |
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2299c31
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plan ahead. '[The] keys to success are to plan ahead, to choose manageable recipes and to cook in batches' (The New York Times). Always tautological. Would you plan behind?
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Bill Bryson |
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19aca9c
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advance planning. The advance in advance planning is always redundant. All planning must be done in advance.
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Bill Bryson |
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56e5673
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affect, effect. As a verb, affect means to influence ('Smoking may affect your health') or to adopt a pose or manner ('He affected ignorance'). Effect as a verb means to accomplish ('The prisoners effected an escape'). As a noun, the word needed is almost always effect (as in 'personal effects' or 'the damaging effects of war'). Affect as a noun has a narrow psychological meaning to do with emotional states (by way of which it is related to..
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Bill Bryson |
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5456eab
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We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms--up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested--probably once belonged to Shakespeare.
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Bill Bryson |
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6528c0e
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We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms--up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested--probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.
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Bill Bryson |
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a79386d
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put an end to is an expression to which one might usefully do just that. Make it 'stop'.
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Bill Bryson |
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d787fff
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pyrrhic victory is not, as is sometimes thought, a hollow triumph. It is one won at a huge cost to the victor.
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Bill Bryson |