How do you pronounce affluent: AF-loo-int or uh-FLOO-int? Does it make a difference? Charles Harrington Elster believes that yes, it does make a difference (and that, for the record, one should pronounce the word AF-loo-int). Elster, the author of Is There a Cow in Moscow? and There Is No Zoo in Zoology, has chosen more than six hundred of our most commonly mispronounced words, arranged them alphabetically, and written entertaining essays that unapologetically offer his informed opinion as to why a word should be pronounced a particular way. Where pronunciations commonly vary or dictionaries disagree, Elster is an eager arbiter. Easy to use (there aren't any confusing diacritical marks), and with references from Will Shakespeare to Will Smith (for "aunt") and Jerry Seinfeld (for "clitoris"), this is an excellent argument-settler - and debate-starter. A Houghton Mifflin Paperback original.
Charles Harrington Elster is a writer, broadcaster, and logophile--a lover of words.
He is the author of the popular vocabulary-building program "Verbal Advantage." His other books include "Tooth and Nail" and "Test of Time," vocabulary-building novels for high school students preparing to take the college entrance exams; "There's a Word for It," a lighthearted look at unusual--and unusually useful--words; "What in the Word?" a salmagundi of word lore, wordplay, and advice on usage and pronunciation; and "The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations," now in its second edition, which the late William Safire of The New York Times hailed as "the best survey of the spoken field in years."
Charlie's latest book, "The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly," was published in July 2010 by St. Martin's Griffin. He is currently writing a vocabulary-building companion to "Verbal Advantage" called "Word Workout."
Charlie was a consultant for "Garner's Modern American Usage." He is the pronunciation editor of "Black's Law Dictionary" and The Orthoepist (pronunciation expert) for Wordnik.com, an online dictionary project. He has been a guest contributor to the "On Language" column of The New York Times Magazine, and his articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and other publications.
Charlie has also been talking about language on the radio since 1985. He has been interviewed on NPR's "Talk of the Nation," "Weekend Edition," and "All Things Considered" and been a guest on hundreds of radio shows around the country. For five and a half years he cohosted a weekly public radio talk show on language called "A Way with Words."
Charlie was born in New York City in 1957 and earned his B.A. cum laude from Yale in 1981. He lives in San Diego with his wife and two daughters.
