book notes
Pam Peters reviews How Much can a Koala Bear? A guide to commonly confused words. By Pamela Thorne Viva Books 2010 rrp $24.95.
The playful title of this book on “commonly confused words” comes from the 1983 “Australiana” album of the comedian/songwriter Austen Tayshus. His name or rather pseudonym rode on the back of “Gloria Soames” and other creations of Afferbeck Lauder, author of Let Stalk Strine (1965), a publication which celebrated the assimilated pronunciations of stereotypical phrases in Australian English.
Written rather than spoken communication is the focus of How Much can a Koala Bear by business communication trainer Pamela Thorne. The book is structured like a dictionary, with each letter of the alphabet prefaced by a quotation on good writing from celebrated authors. Some of them (e.g. Aristotle, Horace, Pascal, Flaubert) wrote in languages other than English, and as those names suggest they cover a vast span of time. But they show the persistent concern of great writers with the choice of words. This is underscored at the letter A (with Mark Twain’s comment the “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. It’s like the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” And again at the letter Z, with Hemingway’s crafted statement: “All our words from loose using have lost their edge”.
The book includes a substantial number of entries (over 900) on pairs or sets of words commonly confused by their spelling or other aspects of their form or meaning. The author distinguishes them by simple definitions (e.g. bite is “a mouthful of food”, byte is “unit of measurement of computer information storage”. These brief definitions suffice to show the different contexts to which the words belong, and help to warn writers off the word which doesn’t fit the scenario they are working in. The entries also provide an example of each word’s use within a short phrase, which shows the most common collocation and helps to pin down the meaning without resorting to the traditional (often rather wordy) dictionary style. The entries are concise and clearly worded. Many of the words presented as pairs and sets are crossreferenced from elsewhere in the alphabetical list – though not all. For example the choice between hazard and risk is only listed under the letter H, not under R. Perhaps the danger of confusion arises mostly from the first rather than the second word. But for some writers it may be a matter of looking up whichever of the confusable words they can spell. This is the problem encapsulated in the ironic quotation from Gracian at the start of the letter B: “A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.”
The koala bear of the title features at the start of the dictionary as a bespectacled writer complete with pens and old-fashioned typewriter, and as the leisured reader at the end, lying in a hammock complete with paperback and cocktail in hand. There are decorative line drawings of gum leaves in twos and threes and fours scattered through the book, suggesting perhaps the difficult choices that the literate koala has to make. Yet as the third national animal (after the emu and the kangaroo), the koala is not quite the archetypal Australian (compare the kiwi’s status in New Zealand), and the book’s emphasis on Australian English is muted, although flagged in the introduction. Just a sprinkling of entries focus on differences between Australian and American English, e.g. extrovert or introvert?, jewellery or jewelry?, learned or learnt?, Labor or labour? practice or practice?. In fact most of the book’s discriminations between confusable words apply to English almost anywhere in the English-speaking world — even if the picky koala is most at home in Australia.
How Much can a Koala Bear is a helpful ready reference for readers/writers who pause on a word which needs disentangling from others with a similar spelling or meaning. They will probably need to consult a full dictionary of usage guide to extend their knowledge. But this book will serve its purpose by alerting them to the issues, and encouraging them to seek out the mot juste in their own writing. |
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