OUR FRIEND LYNNE TRUSS'S very famous and successful romp-cum-primer Eats, Shoots & Leaves sold like hotcakes in America but put the nose of one eminent literary critic distinctly out of joint. Writing in that bastion of correct usage The New Yorker, Louis Menand remarked that “an Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces”.

You see, contrary to popular opinion, we Yanks take punctuation and grammar terribly, terribly seriously. Go to college in the United States and know that you must never be without the awe-inspiring Chicago Manual of Style (now available online at chicagomanualofstyle.org); nothing similar seems to be offered here. Maybe it's to do with our having a written constitution, while you Brits never felt the need of such a thing. But that's by the by.

Now, however, your favourite transplanted American (and mine) has ventured into the field of Linguistic Guidance for Limeys. Bill Bryson has a fantastic knack of rendering the frightening (string theory, say) accessible, and now he has given us Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Language lovers - of every stripe and creed - should raise three cheers.

We at The Times continue to be proud that young Bryson cut his grammatical teeth here, working as a sub-editor some while ago; he hasn't lost his taste for the particularities of language. You can have fun breaking rules only if you know them in the first place.

Some of us like fast cars. Some prefer, I don't know, coronation memorabilia. Some of us are quite happy with words, and if you are one of those - as I am - then Bryson's book is for you. How fine to be furnished with an appendix for -ible and -able! (They sound like a pair of Borscht Belt comics, don't they?) The Abominable Snowman is found beyond that impassible ridge. There's a list of the monarchs of England: I had absolutely forgotten that King Stephen (1135-54) is the sole monarch from the House of Blois (after Norman, before Plantagenet). But then I'm foreign, as I said before - I'm sure you all know that.

So before spring springs, clear out your linguistic cobwebs, with the help of Bill Bryson - whose Keep Britain Tidy campaign spreads its tentacles wider and wider.

Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors
Doubleday, £14.99

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