One of the English language&#8217;s most skilled and beloved writers guides us all toward precise, mistake-free usage.<br><br>As usual Bill Bryson says it best: &#8220;English is a dazzlingly idiosyncratic tongue, full of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense. This is a language where &#8216;cleave&#8217; can mean to cut in half or to hold two halves together; where the simple word &#8216;set&#8217; has 126 different meanings as a verb, 58 as a noun, and 10 as a participial adjective; where if you can run fast you are moving swiftly, but if you are stuck fast you are not moving at all; [and] where &#8216;colonel,&#8217; &#8216;freight,&#8217; &#8216;once,&#8217; and &#8216;ache&#8217; are strikingly at odds with their spellings.&#8221; As a copy editor for the London<i> Times</i> in the early 1980s, Bill Bryson felt keenly the lack of an easy-to-consult, authoritative guide to avoiding the traps and snares in English, and so he brashly suggested to a publisher that he should write one. Surprisingly, the proposition was accepted, and for &#8220;a sum of money carefully gauged not to cause embarrassment or feelings of overworth,&#8221; he proceeded to write that book&#8211;his first, inaugurating his stellar career.<br><br>Now, a decade and a half later, revised, updated, and thoroughly (but not overly) Americanized, it has become <i>Bryson&#8217;s Dictionary of Troublesome Words</i>, more than ever an essential guide to the wonderfully disordered thing that is the English language. With some one thousand entries, from &#8220;a, an&#8221; to &#8220;zoom,&#8221; that feature real-world examples of questionable usage from an international array of publications, and with a helpful glossary and guide to pronunciation, this precise, prescriptive, and&#8211;because it is written by Bill Bryson&#8211;often witty book belongs on the desk of every person who cares enough about the language not to maul or misuse or distort it.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>