About this item
An entertaining and informative guide to the most common 150 words even smart people use incorrectly, along with pithy forays into their fascinating etymologies and tangled histories of use and misuse. Even the most erudite among us use words like apocryphal, facetious, ironic, meteorite, moot, redundant, and unique incorrectly every day. Don't be one of them. Using examples of misuse from leading newspapers, prominent public figures and famous writers, among others, language gurus Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras explain how to avoid these perilous pitfalls in the English language. Each entry also includes short histories of how and why these mistake have happened, some of the (often surprisingly nasty) debates about which uses are (and are not) mistakes, and finally, how to use these words correctly .
About the Author
I'm half of a sister-and-brother bestselling writing and editing team, with over 5.2 million copies of our work in print. We're the authors of many word-oriented books like New York Times bestseller You're Saying It Wrong, That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means, and our newest, Awkword Moments, and we do a podcast cleverly (!) titled "You're Saying It Wrong" -- a kind of Car Talk about words -- with NPR affiliate KMUW (https://www.npr.org/podcasts/642595029/you-re-saying-it-wrong) We've also compiled a series of bestselling quote books like Age Doesn't Matter Unless You're a Cheese and It Always Seems Impossible Until It's Done, as well as the page-a-day calendar The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said (now in its 25th year) and its counterpart The 365 Smartest Things Ever Said.On the non-work side of things, I am a noir film and novel fiend, a bad joke aficionado and committer of truly deplorable puns, a collector and seller of pulp art prints, and am proud to say I was on Jeopardy (but, sadly, came in third - and only won a designer watch and a Steam-Vac.) . You can find me on Twitter @kathrynpetras, Facebook at FB/kathy.petras or, for a collection of found humor, FB/unusually.stupid. Our website is www.kandrpetras.com.
