In 1909, Ambrose Bierce was tired of people abusing the term “literally.” In his book Write It Right, the Civil War veteran and satirist drew up an alphabetical list of linguistic sins, then put each one out of its misery with the stiletto humor that would make his Devil’s Dictionary (1911) an American classic. Of using “Literally for Figuratively” (“The stream was literally alive with fish,” and “His eloquence literally swept the audience from its feet,”) Bierce wrote, “It is bad enough to exaggerate, but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.” If he hadn’t literally vanished in Mexico in 1913, he might have found the present state of our language difficult to bear.

We have a long tradition of grousing about the vulgar errors of English-as-she-is-spoke, but the linguist Arika Okrent is interested by the burrs in the very fabric of our language—the irregular verbs, synonyms, and spellings that make English so hard for non-native speakers to master. Some of these quirks come from common errors long ingrained by habit among the speakers of the language; ironically, others come from critics—Okrent calls them “snobs”—in the school of Bierce. In the readable, bite-sized chapters of Highly Irregular, Okrent tells the story of how English became such a mess, assuring us that “there is plenty of blame to go around.”

Okrent tells the story of how English became such a mess, assuring us that “there is plenty of