Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English and other popular language books: "If you love language and the unvarnished truth, you'll love Everything You Know About English Is Wrong."
FeatureBook.com: "A good counterpoint to Lynne Truss’s anxiety-inducing Eats, Shoots & Leaves."
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A bit of word play about playing with words:
Everything You Know About English Is Wrong is a playful (and, oh yeah, often cynical) look at how we use language. Here are some thoughts on how we use it when instead we should utilize it:
Utilize
File under “Utile, the Futile”: Utilize is not a bad word.
The language guard dogs (I among them), so voracious and verbacious (as my colleague Richard Lederer would call them), snapping at and tearing apart verbal flab, flabbery and flabaciousness, regularly warn against using a long word when a shorter synonym will suffice (and you may wonder why I don't just say “when a shorter synonym will do”?). For a time, the poster child of flabasciousness seemed to be utilize, as in “I utilized my cell phone to call my grandmother.”*
Much shorter (and more appropriately invisible), is the word use, as in “I used the phone to call my grandmother.” (Better yet, how about “I phoned my grandmother”?—though that’s a wholly different discussion.)
In this case, my fellow guard dogs are correct. But some of the sharp-toothed bunch, still slathering and seething, will next descend on such sentences as “I utilized my cell phone to prop open my eyelids” (probably with Grandma still chattering on the other side). In that sentence, replacing utilized with used would have been shorter . . . and weaker. In this context, use isn’t incorrect, but it’s less precise. To utilize something is to make it useful (or, more precisely, to make it utile, to employ a now-quite-rare adjective meaning “having utility”). And to utilize something is also to give it a new, undesigned use. For instance, if I pick my teeth with a leather punch (it happened only once, I assure you), I am utilizing the leather punch, not merely using it. I use toothpicks to pick my teeth (well, I do now, anyway).
The point here is that some poster children of flabasciousness and other sins against the language are mere innocent victims with a proper place in speech. In this specific instance, the word utilize has both use and utility, and the word use has both utility and use. In the larger context of the language: Every word has its utility. Every word has its use.
More samples
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