Bryan Garner, one of the world’s leading authorities on the English language, first began reading the dictionary as a teenager—because of a girl. He had used the word facetious. She admiringly noted his vocabulary. “I thought, ‘Well, I can really work on this,’ ” Mr. Garner tells me wryly. So he began copying good words, perhaps 20 keepers a day, into a notebook. “It took me about two years to realize that having an enormous vocabulary does not work on females by itself,” he says. “By that time I had fallen in love with the English language.”
Today, Mr. Garner is the editor in chief of “Black’s Law Dictionary” and a contributor to “The Chicago Manual of Style.” He has even become an eponym: “Garner’s Modern English Usage,” the fourth edition of his widely acclaimed guide to stringing words together well, dropped in April. Mr. Garner gives about 200 seminars a year, teaching lawyers—the best-paid writers in the world, he likes to say—how to polish their prose.