I’m grateful to many people for improving my sense of style and The Sense of Style.
For three decades Katya Rice taught me much of what I know about style by copyediting six of my books with precision, thoughtfulness, and taste. Before editing this one, Katya read it as an expert, spotting problems and offering wise advice.
I have the good fortune of being married to my favorite writer. In addition to inspiring me with her own style, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein encouraged this project, expertly commented on the manuscript, and thought up the title.
Many academics have the lamentable habit of using “my mother” as shorthand for an unsophisticated reader. My mother, Roslyn Pinker, is a sophisticated reader, and I’ve benefited from her acute observations on usage, the many articles on language she’s sent me over the decades, and her incisive comments on the manuscript.
Les Perelman was the director of Writing Across the Curriculum at MIT during the two decades I taught there, and offered me invaluable support and advice on the teaching of writing to university students. Jane Rosenzweig, director of the Writing Center of Harvard College, has been similarly encouraging, and both commented helpfully on the manuscript. Thanks go as well to Erin Driver-Linn and Samuel Moulton of the Harvard Initiative for Learning & Teaching.
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and The American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition, are two great accomplishments of twenty-first-century scholarship, and I have been blessed with advice and comments from their overseers: Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum, coauthors of the Cambridge Grammar, and Steven Kleinedler, executive editor of AHD. Thanks go as well to Joseph Pickett, former executive editor of AHD, who invited me to chair the Usage Panel and gave me an insider’s look at how a dictionary is made, and to the current editors Peter Chipman and Louise Robbins.
As if this expertise weren’t enough, I have benefited from the comments of other wise and knowledgeable colleagues. Ernest Davis, James Donaldson, Edward Gibson, Jane Grimshaw, John R. Hayes, Oliver Kamm, Gary Marcus, and Jeffrey Watumull offered penetrating comments on the first draft. Paul Adams, Christopher Chabris, Philip Corbett, James Engell, Nicholas Epley, Peter C. Gordon, Michael Hallsworth, David Halpern, Joshua Hartshorne, Samuel Jay Keyser, Stephen Kosslyn, Andrea Lunsford, Liz Lutgendorff, John Maguire, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Debra Poole, Jesse Snedeker, and Daniel Wegner answered questions and directed me to relevant research. Various examples in the book were suggested by Ben Backus, Lila Gleitman, Katherine Hobbs, Yael Goldstein Love, Ilavenil Subbiah, and emailers too numerous to list. Special thanks go to Ilavenil for the many subtle variations and shadings of usage she has called to my attention over the years, and for designing the diagrams and trees in this book.
My editors at Penguin, Wendy Wolf in the United States and Thomas Penn and Stefan McGrath in the United Kingdom, and my literary agent, John Brockman, supported this project at every stage, and Wendy provided detailed criticism and advice on the first draft.
I’m grateful, too, for the love and support of the other members of my family: my father, Harry Pinker; my stepdaughters, Yael Goldstein Love and Danielle Blau; my niece and nephews; my in-laws, Martin and Kris; and my sister, Susan Pinker, and brother, Robert Pinker, to whom this book is dedicated.
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Parts of chapter 6 have been adapted from my essay on usage in The American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition, and from my article “False Fronts in the Language Wars,” published in Slate in 2012.