| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Page 78
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| Thus a violation of human rights may be blatant or flagrant. If it was committed with contempt for public scrutiny, it is blatant. If its barbarity was monstrous, it was flagrant. | 1 |
| Blatant can also mean “unpleasantly loud.” People sometimes use it to mean “obvious,” as in the blatant danger of such an approach, but this use has not been established and is widely considered an error. | 2 |
boast
| | Some have objected to the use of boast as a transitive verb meaning “to possess or own a desirable feature,” as in This network boasts an audience with a greater concentration of professionals and managers than any other network. This usage is by now well established, however, and is acceptable to 62 percent of the Usage Panel. | 3 |
born / borne
| | These words are both past participles of bear. Here’s how to sort them out. Use born only in passive constructions referring to birth: I was born in Chicago. For all other uses, including active constructions referring to birth, use borne: She has borne both her children at home. I have borne his insolence with the patience of a saint. | 4 |
both
| | Both indicates that the action or state denoted by the verb applies individually to each of two entities. Both books weigh more than five pounds, for example, means that each book weighs more than five pounds by itself, not that the two books weighed together come to more than five pounds. Both is inappropriate where the verb does not apply to each of the entities by itself. | 5 |
| both their fault /
the fault of both
| | How do you make possessives for both? See
possessives under Grammar. | 6 |
| both …
and …
| | See
parallelism under Style. | 7 |
bring
| | bring and
take
| | When do you use bring and when do you use take? It depends on your point of view. We use bring to indicate motion toward the place of speaking or the place from which the action is regarded. Thus you normally take checks to the bank and bring home cash, although from the banker’s perspective you have brought checks to the bank in order to take away cash. | 8 |
| When the point of reference is not the place of speaking itself, you can use either verb depending on the context. Thus you can say either The labor leaders brought their requests to the mayor’s office or The labor leaders took their requests to the mayor’s office depending on whether you want to describe things from the point of view of the labor leaders or the mayor. Perhaps for this reason, the distinction between bring and take is sometimes less clear than you might expect. A parent may say of a child, for example, She always takes a pile of books home with her from school, as the parent imagines the situation from the child’s viewpoint. This usage may sound curious to those who are accustomed to observe the distinction more strictly, but there is really nothing wrong with it. | 9 |
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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