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CHARLIE'S FAVORITE WORD
resistentialism: "seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects" — Paul Hellweg, The Insomniac's Dictionary Resistentialism was coined by the British humorist Paul Jennings in a brilliant send-up of Jean-Paul Sartre and the philosophy of existentialism published in the Spectator in April 1948. For more information about this word, read Charlie's article "Things Are Against Us" in Selected Works in the sidebar to the right. Reckless DrivingSpeaking of accidents, I recently received an email from my younger daughter's middle school. Whoever typed it up and sent it out broke my cardinal rule for accident-free writing: "Proofread, proofread, proofread before you unleash your words on the world!" The following selections from the message are the equivalent of a runaway truck headed for a cliff: "Hello Parents: This is CPMA principal, [unnecessary comma]Scott Thomason with an important message." "Students can . . . work through out [throughout] the summer at thier [their] own pace." "Students have already received a [an] informational handout and many have already begun working on the progarm [program][comma needed] so don't wait, [comma should be a period] get your student signed up now." |
Profile of a Logophile
(Photo: Randy Hoffman)
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 and the narrator of the audio version. 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 and wordplay in a question-and-answer format; 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, his tenth, is The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly, which St. Martin's Griffin published in July 2010. He is currently writing a companion to Verbal Advantage called Word Workout. Charlie is the orthoepist (pronunciation expert) for the online dictionary project Wordnik.com, the pronunciation editor of Black's Law Dictionary, and a consultant for Garner's Modern American Usage. He has several times been a guest "On Language" columnist for The New York Times Magazine, and his articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and other publications. Charlie has 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. With fellow verbivore Richard Lederer he founded and cohosted a weekly public radio talk show on language called A Way with Words from 1998 to 2004. Charlie is also a voice talent with more than 25 years of audio narration experience. You can listen to his demo by clicking on the link to the Shamon Freitas agency in "Quick Links" in the sidebar on the right. 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. Copyright © 2010 by Charles Harrington Elster. Media outlets may reproduce or broadcast the text of this page. 
Charlie at work in his home office in San Diego, on an ancient computer he long ago recycled.
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