If you don't use it, you lose it

(Apologies if this is the wrong forum. I didn't see a better fit.)

I forgot the difference between loath and loathe. I never use either of them, so I had to look it up while editing somebody else's manuscript. I found an article by Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief over at Random House.

I used to follow Dreyer's articles as well as I could, but I've left off. This is a sample of his work and is the very article that helped me with my loath / loathe problem.

Reading through it, I found a few other things I'd forgotten through disuse. That there is such a word as premiere, for example. Or that vice and vise are different things. I use them verbally, of course, but I never seem to write any of those words down.

I disagree with a few of his opinions, but I understand his prescriptivist bent. You can't edit books all willy-nilly, after all. And he is fair enough to admit defeat when the time comes.

Dreyer has a new book coming out, Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, which could only be helpful. Hardback runs about 20 bucks.

If I do order it, I hope he covers alright and all right, though I think I can guess which way he'll lean on that.

ReadWriteRachel said:

"Alright" is never all right!

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Them's fightin' words!

I do think it's interesting that there are so many examples of this. Further and farther are ones that I always get mixed up -- it took a professor coming down hard on me to really get me to pay attention to that.

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That's a battle that I've given up on. Technically, they're the same word, but the separate usage has become so ingrained that I now just consider it a case of language drift.

Another irritating thing when writing is words that are one letter different, so Word never catches them as misspellings and I only find them much later with a fine-toothed comb. That/than and this/his are two of the most common ones for me.

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Agreed! His / Is gets me most often.