Bad, bad Bill.

[darcydodo]

I was just looking at the excerpt from Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words on Amazon, and I came across "admit to," which he says is incorrect. This did not seem right to me, so I went and looked in the OED. The OED says: "II.2.e. admit to (something): to acknowledge (a weakness, etc.); to confess to (doing or being something)." More to the point, that's the only case in which it admits that definition for "admit." (My usage here demonstrates what BB was presumably actually thinking of, but none of his examples was accurate for this case.)

If Bryson had his way and deleted those "to"s, we'd end up with Jesse Jackson allowing someone to father a child on a staffer, some other country raiding Angola with South Africa's permission, etc.

I repeat: Bad, bad Bill.

Comments

[darcydodo]

I'm quite happy with the web edition, although it would be nice to have a real, physical copy of it. I missed having access to it several times while I was in Europe!