Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English

I recently bought a retro orange penguin edition (Australian) of this book and loved dipping through it. It made me more conscious about how I was using certain words and why. I recommend it to any person who is studying or interested in the finer workings of written English. As a mature age university student I found the way I tackled essay writing improved due to the thought I gave during the writing and editing processes. I now feel paranoid about the English usage in this review. . .have I made a fool? :)

The copy I bought was published in 1964 and last revised in 1947. It is an amusing little romp through the English language and while it is not for all readers, certainly, for those of us who want to know, for instance, Group Terms, Nouns of Assemblage, ie: a colony of gulls, a dray of squirrels, a bale of turtles, on and on, covering a wide variety of nouns, it's very thorough and much like an old dictionary. There is much to be learned in this book, although my copy is antiquated and would not be helpful to someone interested in popular slang or present day terms. Still, when there's nothing much else to do, it does provide some interesting reading.

Indespensible for anyone who wishes to write clearly and elegantly. But, in this age of email one has to wonder does anyone really care?

I have a very old copy of this book. This particular purchase was made for a friend in Spain who is interested in the finer points of English. I told her that Partridge was the authority and that he made for very entertaining reading as well. The book is rife with such Edwardian style quips as one that describes one usage as an extremely low banality. A few pages with Partridge and you will be back to Waugh et al.