“Pedantry,” said Swift, “is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.” The irascible dean of Saint Patrick’s encountered pedantry everywhere: “in all arts and sciences; and sometimes in trades,” among “fiddlers, dancing-masters, heralds, masters of the ceremony,” who within their narrow sphere were “greater pedants than Lipsius, or the elder Scaliger.” Swift hated pedants, as he always did, with a perfect hatred. He found the worst offenders at court:

While I knew it, [it] was always plentifully stocked; I mean from the gentleman usher (at least) inclusive, downwards to the gentleman porter; who are, generally speaking, the most insignificant race of people that this island can afford, and with the smallest tincture of good manners, which is the only trade they profess. For being wholly illiterate, and conversing chiefly with each other, they reduce the whole system of breeding within the forms and circles of their several offices: and as they are below the notice of ministers, they live and die in court under all revolutions with great obsequiousness to those who are in any degree of favour or credit, and with rudeness or insolence to everybody else.

All of this abuse was poured out in an essay he termed “A Treatise on Good-Manners and Good-Breeding.” The piece ends, with characteristic Swiftian backhandedness, on a somewhat pedantic note, in which he explains the “difference between good manners and good breeding,” which “in order to vary my expression,” he said, “I am sometimes forced to confound.” For Swift good manners were “the art of remembering and applying certain settled forms of general behaviour.” Here he means the sorts of things that in my own increasingly remote childhood were regarded as the basic equipment of civilization: saying “please,” addressing one’s elders as “sir” or “ma’am,” holding the door open for others, offering one’s chair or place on the train to women, and so on. Good breeding was something much wider in scope. “Besides an uncommon degree of literature sufficient to qualify a gentleman for reading a play, or a political pamphlet,” he wrote, “it takes in a great compass of knowledge; no less than that of dancing, fighting, gaming, making the circle of Italy, riding the great horse, and speaking French; not to mention some other secondary, or subaltern accomplishments, which are more easily acquired.” Even the cleverest people could not hope to appear well-bred “without study and labour,” but simple good manners could be acquired with only “a tolerable degree of reason . . . without other assistance.”

Today, of course, practically no one is well-bred in the sense that Swift and his contemporaries recognized, and the well-mannered are also something of an endangered species. The significance of Swift’s distinction lies not in its usefulness for those of us who are unlikely to meet with numerous examples of either good breeding or good manners but in delighting persons who find precision of thought and language valuable for their own sake.

It is this sort of reader to whom Eli Burnstein’s book is addressed. The author begins, cleverly enough, with an “Introduction, Foreword, or Preface” in which the differences between these types of prolegomenary literature are carefully laid out. Here he explains that he is offering us “a sort of mental taste test—a Pepsi Challenge, even—serving up two or more commonly confused phenomena and a brief description of what makes them different.”

For this would-be contestant, I am afraid, Burnstein’s framing of his task invites misgivings. The problem here is that, despite what partisans of either cola might suggest to the contrary, the infamous Coke vs. Pepsi tests were a matter of taste rather than of fact or even long-standing convention. Participants were not asked to identify the difference between the two sodas or to consider what the most learned authorities had said about their definitions, but to tell which they preferred. This is not how one approaches the difference between, for example, “anchorites” and “hermits,” even if one happens to be a connoisseur of ultra-cloistered religious life. Such slackness, even in a matter of analogy, does not bode well for a volume ostensibly devoted to “infinite and infinitesimal nuances.”

The hundred or so entries in the Dictionary of Fine Distinctions can be divided into three broad-ish categories. The first involves things that, pace Burnstein’s preface—or was it a brief introduction?—one finds it very difficult to imagine being the object of actual widespread confusion. I doubt there is a single person who is in danger of mistaking a “speedometer” for an “odometer.” While someone hearing a piece of music for the first time might find himself unable to determine whether he is listening a “symphony” or a “concerto,” I do not think conceptual confusion is at work there so much as a lack of interest. In many cases the latent possibility of bewilderment is only there for persons who are unlikely ever to come across the entry’s subject in the first place, as with “blank” vs. “free” verse or “slapstick” vs. “screwball” (a term I have always found instinctively distasteful, preferring “Golden Age romantic comedy”).

Burnstein’s oddest entries address distinctions that are almost certainly known to anyone familiar with their respective subjects. The kind of person who could not distinguish between natural numbers and rational numbers (or cardinal and ordinal ten pages later) is unlikely to have heard of either. The same is true of “amp” vs. “volt” vs. “watt”; some of us will be ignorant of the meanings of all of these terms, but this is not the same thing as our confusing them, in the sense of actually thinking that watts are a measure of current rather than output. In any case, the distinction between each of them can hardly be called “fine,” unless one believes that there is also comparatively little daylight between, say, miles per hour and horsepower. To confuse “emoji” with “emoticon” one would have to have heard anyone refer to the latter at some point since the Bush administration. The fact that it is necessary to point out that “while mathematically 4/4 and 2/2 are identical, musically they are not” is the unfortunate result of teaching children fractions before music theory; this ought not be a “fine distinction” by any measure.

When asked why he had given the wrong definition of “pastern” in his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson famously replied, “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.” Only a similar plea could possibly excuse readers who come to these pages in search of enlightenment concerning “lute” and “lyre,” “beautiful” and “sublime,” “jargon” and “slang,” “grammar” and “syntax,” “assume” and “presume,” “lager” and “ale,” “civil” and “common” law, and (the most baffling) “combination” and “permutation.” It is far easier to imagine someone being unaware of the respective horizontal and vertical dimensions of cousinhood (though with the decline in family sizes one wonders how long this will even be the subject of sustained inquiry). Ditto “Ponzi” vs. “Pyramid” schemes, of which Burnstein’s capsule summary commits itself instantly to memory (“One robs Peter to pay Paul. The other charges Peter for permission to charge Paul”). Ten years before the masthead have convinced me that making “Great Britain” synonymous with “the United Kingdom” and vice versa is so widespread as to be almost excusable, however shameful (and politically insensitive to the increasingly put-upon Orangemen). With “envy” vs. “jealousy,” too, I am afraid the battle is lost for good, though I do not begrudge Burnstein his Lost Cause.

He is on much firmer ground with the next group: “hue,” “tint,” “shade,” “tone”; “lattice” and “trellis”; “U.I. vs. “U.X.” (though the explanation put me to sleep); “deep web” and “dark web” (ditto); “epigram,” “aphorism,” “maxim,” “adage,” “proverb”; the “continental” vs. the “contiguous” United States (though who can be ashamed of ignoring Canada?); and, in an almost virtuoso illustrated multi-page sequence, “porch,” “deck,” “veranda,” “patio.” Before opening this book I could not have told you that “sorbet” is strictly non-dairy, while “sherbet” products may include “up to 2% milkfat.” In the case of “satin” and “sateen” I must confess that I was under the impression that the latter was an older, variant spelling. One might insist that since the two are nearly always used metaphorically in a pair, the difference between “flotsam,” which has found its way into the water accidentally, and “jetsam,” cargo that has been intentionally thrown overboard, is mainly one of curiosity, but Burnstein helpfully informs us that under maritime law, the former remains the property of its owner, while the latter, if found, may be legally claimed by anyone. “Joint,” “spliff,” and “blunt” are repulsive without regard to their precise denotations, while the opposite might be said of “tights,” “leggings,” “pantyhose,” and “stockings.” With “all-wheel-drive” and “four-wheel-drive” he once again shows his penchant for concise and memorable definitions: “One is safe and sophisticated,” he tells us. “One is rugged and badass” (he offers a more detailed technical description later). I certainly understand what he means about “terrace” vs. “balcony,” though in practice I think the actual difference is that the former tends to be used (accurately or otherwise) in pretentious advertising copy to describe all manner of elevated outdoor seating areas, whereas the former conjures up theater or concert venues. Those like this reviewer who are initiated into the international freemasonry of Jane Austen fandom are already well up on the differences between various types of hansoms, coaches, and so on, but the profane and cowan are unfortunately numerous; in middle school I suspect I could have passed an examination on “flails” and “maces” and “morning stars,” to say nothing of “catapults,” which “hurl objects through a sudden release of tension,” and “trebuchets,” which do so “through counterweights and a sling,” but the refresher course was most welcome. The entry here on “typeface” and “font” is a model of the sheerest pedantry here thankfully acknowledged; it bites its thumb at all usage and convention except in the narrowest of technical circles. The longest discussion in the book is headed “Latte vs. Flat White vs. Cappuccino vs. Cortado,” to which my only response was the instantaneous impression that anyone who has ever publicly uttered the words “flat white”—a phrase so acutely and cloyingly precious, so knowingly, smugly tedious, so redolent of the sort of faux sophistication and moral foppishness that aroused Swift’s righteous hatred—to a poor uniformed server deserves to be expertly beaten up. In the pages of a family publication the (meaningful, I take it) difference between “kink” and “fetish” is one that I am required to pass over in silence.

Some of the other helpful entries are occasions of sadness. That I came to this volume insufficiently WASP-y to know or care what distinguishes “squash” from “racquetball” is, I am sure, one of the great tragedies of my life. A similarly gloomy thought that will occur to any reader of these pages is how divorced most of us are from the experience of our nautical ancestors, to whom “bays” (“recessed bodies of water”), “gulfs” (“very large bays”), and “coves” (“small bay[s], usually with a narrow entrance and sheltered by steep cliff walls”) and “piers” extending outward from the shore, “quays” running alongside them, and “wharfs” reaching out haphazardly as coastlines dictate were as different as lighting and lightning bugs.

Phew. The third group is far and away the most numerous. These are entries which are best described as “debatable,” in the sense that one does not necessarily agree with the purported distinctions to which Burnstein intends to draw our attention. Take, for example, what he tells us about “convince” and “persuade”: he would have it that while we “convince someone to believe something,” we “persuade someone to do something.” “Strictly speaking,” Burnstein writes, “the distinction is a grammatical one, the principle being that convince should pair with of plus a noun, while persuade should pair with to plus a verb.” To this he adds, in a spirit of would-be generosity, “You may wish to observe this rule to keep your writing nice and crisp, but these days the distinction is so subdued, and the two words’ interchangeability so accepted, that they may be treated as more or less equivalent.”

This will not do. First of all, the pseudo-distinction he is attempting to draw here would better be described not as “grammatical” but as a matter of idiom or usage; no one would say that it is ungrammatical to pair “convince” with “that” or “persuade” with “to.” Let’s hope not anyway; if these are solecisms they exist on every page of Gibbon. I found the following purported solecisms in less than one minute’s flipping at random through my old Everymans: “An Author easily persuades himself that the public opinion is still favorable to his labors”; “I am persuaded that it would be susceptible of entertainment, as well as information”; “When we reflect on the fame of Thebes and Argos, of Sparta and Athens, we can scarcely persuade ourselves, that so many immortal republics of ancient Greece were lost in a single province of the Roman empire, which, from the superior influence of the Achæan league, was usually denominated the province of Achaia.” Such examples could be multiplied infinitely, from the author of the Decline and Fall and many others.

In some cases Burnstein attempts to introduce precise definitions while noting that both denotations and connotations have shifted historically, such that previous generations would find his would-be downward spiral of depravity from “autocrat” to “despot” to “tyrant” to “dictator” incomprehensible. In his entry on “monks” vs. “friars” (itself not inherently bad), he makes a point of introducing Martin Luther, who referred to himself as a monk on countless occasions; his best modern biographer, Lyndal Roper, follows her subject in this usage, and I have never heard anyone—not even actual monks and friars of my acquaintance—object to it. Whatever it might once have meant, today “sofa” vs. “couch” is, as he says, strictly a matter of connotation—if only he had chosen to address “davenport”! His acknowledgment that acceptance of his respective definitions would mean that Theseus encountered the Minotaur in a “maze” rather than a “labyrinth” should be dispositive, but for some reason is not. While the distinction he attempts to draw between “poison” and “venom”—we are invited to think of mushrooms vs. snakes—has a kind of implicit force, it seems obvious that the latter is simply a subset of the former: venom is always poisonous, but not all poisons (e.g., the wine in Hamlet) are venomous. While I admire the commitment to would-be precision involved in attempting to differentiate a “snitch” who “informs on others” from a “rat” who “sells out their own” and their respective glosses as “tattletale” and “traitor,” I do not feel like asking Paulie Walnuts types whether it survives any test of mafia usage.

Speaking of “precision,” I should make it clear that on at least some occasions where I think Burnstein’s distinctions are at best dubious, I find myself inclined to follow him anyway. With “accuracy” and “precision,” for instance, he seems to be attempting something very noble, which is to say, willing into existence useful gradations of meaning in words that are not inherently technical. For most of us these two have, at best, more or less the same definition and our choice of one or the other is simply a matter of euphony. But here is Burnstein’s gloss on the two:

Precise but inaccurate archers are off the mark but consistently so: A slight tweak in their angle and they’ll be pros.

Imprecise but accurate archers are on the mark but only roughly so: With practice and focus, they’ll start hitting the bull’s-eye dead-on.

Archers who are both imprecise and inaccurate are bad at archery.

For the rest of my life I hope to be more accurate in my use of these two adjectives—or should I say precise?

Otherwise, though, the more philosophically weighty the attempted distinction, the likelier the discussion is to fall flat, as it did for me in the case of “ethics,” which he defines as “intelligible principles of right and wrong,” and “morality,” which, he says, “refers to right and wrong as a felt sense.” The italics, needless to say, are very much his. When I read the entry on “rational” (“to be logical”) vs. “reasonable” (“to be sensible”), I could have sworn that I heard the sound of a hundred million Aristotelians simultaneously releasing the safety catches on their revolvers. Worse still are his would-be definitions of “shame”—“the feeling that your innate qualities don’t live up to the standards of beauty, intelligence, character, etc., as defined by your peers or society”—and “guilt”—“the feeling that the actions or thoughts over which you have control transgress standards of right and wrong as dedicated by the law, your parents, your conscience, or your god.” The problems with all of these, on philosophical and usage grounds, are almost too numerous to mention. Among other things, his understanding seems to preclude the possibility that a moral viewpoint could ever be considered “intelligible” (his word, not mine), that guilt could be an objective reality as opposed to some kind of nebulous emotion, or that we should ever rightfully feel shame. Did Burnstein’s mother never tell him he should be ashamed of himself?

I realize that I have already spent some three thousand words breaking butterflies on a wheel, so perhaps the reader will indulge me in a few words about “kitsch” and “camp.” Fools rush in where tinsel angels fear to tread, but here, I think, it would be hard to find oneself less sure-footed than Burnstein. He is simply wrong from the get-go, as when he suggests that unlike kitsch, “which may be used pejoratively or as a term of ironic appreciation,” camp is “a term of appreciation through and through.” In the worst online dictionary I know of I find citations from critics hoping that directors will “avoid the campiness of some of the more recent comics-inspired films”; new musicals are praised for not being “campy and dated”; new trends in tattooing are “much more inspired than the campy ones that used to be all the rage.” Heck, some wag once referred to the “camp authoritarian light displays and general atmosphere of praetorian menace” at Joe Biden’s inauguration. Even less promising are his examples, and not just because half of them—the only ones that aren’t obviously out of place—are deliberate post-Sontag exercises in camp, mainly of the Rocky Horror–Pink Flamingos variety, which strikes me as cheating. His other candidates include Lady Gaga (too popular; camp is inherently anti-majoritarian), KISS (neither kitsch nor camp but simply old-fashioned good bad taste, like The Guess Who or Adam Sandler comedies, to say nothing of being overtly heterosexual in their appeal), and, insanely, Jesus Christ Superstar (a dorky product of the painfully earnest Sixties counterculture that was and will always remain diametrically opposed to camp in both values and aesthetics).

“It is much easier,” Disraeli said, “to be critical than to be correct.” If I had written this book, I might have addressed issues which I am used to seeing confused in print more often than I am the “Oxford English Dictionary” and the “Oxford Dictionary of English,” or “goblin,” “ogre,” and “troll.” The amount of violence we do in this country to forms of address for British titled persons (the wife of a peer or a female holder of a peerage in her own right is “Lady,” not “Dame”; only sons and daughters of peers are referred to as “Lord or Lady First Name Last Name”; only princesses by birth prefix that title to their names, etc.) should make all of us feel guilty about Cornwallis’s defeat. I was genuinely surprised not to find an entry entitled “Immaculate Conception vs. Perpetual Virginity” (subject of a memorable screwup in Gibbon’s chapter on Genghis Khan of all places). Though it largely disappeared from our language more than a century ago, it would have been difficult for me to resist trudging out “will” and “shall,” if only for the sake of the drowning man (“I shall drown! No one will save me”) and the suicide (“I will drown! No one shall save me”) who once fixed this no longer fine distinction in countless memories. And what about that old standby of elementary school teachers, “may” vs. “can”?