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Profile of a Logophile (Photo: Randy Hoffman) Charles Harrington Elster is a writer, broadcaster, and logophile—a lover of words.
He is the author and narrator of the audio vocabulary-building program Verbal Advantage and the book by the same name. 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 has two books forthcoming from St. Martin's Press: The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly will be released in August 2010, and Ultimate Verbal Fitness, a companion to Verbal Advantage, is scheduled for spring 2011. Charlie is the orthoëpist (pronunciation expert) for the online dictionary project Wordnik.com. He was pronunciation editor of the seventh and eighth editions of Black's Law Dictionary and a consultant for Garner's Modern American Usage. He has been a guest contributor to the "On Language" column of 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 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. 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, California. |
