Garner’s Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner (Review … of a sort)

I have been tempted, in the last few weeks, to send copies of Garner’s Modern American Usage to a number of television news anchors and reporters both here in Canada and in the US. I have taken to yelling at the television set (and yes, I know they can’t hear me) every time some reporter or talking head refers to Barack Obama’s win of the US election as “historical.” It’s historic, people. Historic. Not historical. They are not interchangeable adjectives. Historic means “famous or important in history.” Historical just means it happened in the past. All elections, once over, are historical but few are historic.

If it wasn’t for the fact that it’s my television, which I worked long and hard for and can’t afford to replace, the yelling would be followed by the throwing of a few usage guides and dictionaries (in my world they would zip right through the television screen and bonk said reporter or talking head square in the forehead). Alas, I haven’t quite broken with reality enough to think that my fantasy would actually come true.

Fox is a particular offender (don’t judge me, some of my favourite shows are on Fox and occasionally I forget to change the channel and end up listening to news that makes no sense at all until I realize I’m watching the nightly news for the wrong country — I went over a decade without cable so I’m still not used to having American channels). There are offenders at Canadian news anchor desks as well, so don’t think I’m just picking on Americans. Jon Stewart and Rick Mercer, both political satirists and authors, unsurprisingly get the word right.

So what good would a usage guide do? Well, if you’re unfamiliar with them (and many people are), usage guides are a little bit like dictionaries but instead of listing the definitions of words, they list the proper usage of words. A usage guide is the kind of reference book that you pick up when you want to remind yourself of the difference between effect and affect (which trips a lot of people up), the difference between historic and historical (*cough*), or the difference between continuous and continual. There are also entries on when to use which and when to use that.

These guides are also useful to distinguish usage that is wrong as opposed to usage that differs between American, Canadian, and British dialects (there are, of course, more English dialects than that but Garner’s covers these three for the most part). Knowing how usage varies between dialects as well as what is just plain wrong is very important for anyone editing and for anyone writing in this global world of ours.

There are many usage guides out there, but as an all-around general-use guide I find Garner’s most useful. No matter what I’m looking for, 99.9% of the time I find it in Garner’s. I asked a former board member of the Editor’s Association of Canada for a recommendation for a Canadian usage guide and she suggested the Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage, but I rarely end up using it unless I am looking up something particularly Canadian (I don’t think it makes a difference, but my edition is the first edition rather than the second edition being sold now). Most of the more general usage problems I look up aren’t in the Oxford guide, but are invariably in Garner’s.

If you have a dictionary, you should probably have a usage guide as well, particularly if you write for work or for pleasure. No one may point out your usage mistakes to you, but people notice and it affects their opinion of you (I’m not saying it’s right; I’m just saying that it happens). Everyone is prone to usage mistakes and most of us aren’t aware of the ones we are making (otherwise we wouldn’t make them). You can’t rely on newspapers, magazines, or television to teach proper usage (in fact, Garner’s examples of faulty usage are all drawn from newspapers and magazines).  To get it right, you need a usage guide.

(There’s probably a usage error in this post somewhere … no one’s perfect).