How to Tell Fate from Destiny: And Other Skillful Word Distinctions

Elster’s entertaining and instructive resource offers helpful suggestions for distinguishing between words often misused in conversation or writing. Elster points out that even professionals are vulnerable to error, as in this quote from the Guardian: “Tweets are stored on the device so you can keep reading even if you loose [lose] your phone signal.” In each of the book’s alphabetical entries, he includes two or more words that are confused, accompanied by clear examples and detailed explanations of the distinction between them. For instance, he writes, “to convince” means to “make someone believe something,” while “to persuade” means “to make someone take action.” The book includes entries both for words commonly used in conversation or writing—such as “amount, number”; “its, it’s”—and for those less commonly used— “capacious, commodious”; “auger, augur.” Elster can be cheeky, as when he decries the use of “empathy” as a “trendy substitute” for “sympathy”: “sympathy is what you should feel for someone who displays a flashy word when an ordinary one is called for. Empathy is what you should feel when you’ve been making the same stupid mistake yourself.” This appealing book will help readers over countless lexical stumbling blocks, and encourage clearer and more precise speaking and writing. (Oct.)