Yes, there's a need for Slips Of Speech

Ian reports: A few days ago, I took two of my grandchildren to the Australian Reptile Park. It's a good day out, but I felt I had to shield their impressionable young eyes – any time the illuminated sign above an exhibit tried to say "its" it said "it's", as in "this snake sheds it's skin".

On ABC radio 702 in Sydney, the morning presenter says the previous Australian Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, is becoming disinterested in Parliament.

A judge tells a law conference he has a problem with disinterested juries.

An emailed newsletter from the NSW State Library tells me of the enormity of a new exhibition.

In a blurb about a book on English usage, I read that "John Hendricks Bechtel . . . has literally put millions on the highway to greater accomplishment and success".

So, do we need another book on English usage? The examples above (all of which are true) suggest we do – or at least that it can't do any harm.

Less than five years ago, Lynne Truss's book Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation headed bestseller lists in English-speaking countries for many months.

Truss's readers would invite you to join them as they sniggered at the illiteracy of the great unwashed (usually, these smug people bugged me so much I'd switch to discussing the use of the possessive case in gerunds, and mock those who didn't know what I was talking about).

In the past five years, have you seen an improvement in the use of apostrophes?

Is it pedantic to point out that "disinterested" doesn't mean "uninterested". I expect a jury (and the judge) to be disinterested, but I don't want them uninterested.

Is it too late to shout that "enormity" means monstrous wickedness, not of great size?

And with respect to the Globusz people, I doubt that Bechtel, despite his being impressively erudite (note my use of the possessive case in a gerund!), put literally millions of people on any highway, let alone one to greater accomplishment and success.

Yes, I've quoted from the Globusz catalogue blurb for the book I'm reviewing – Slips of Speech, by John Hendricks Bechtel.

Anyone who read the May 8 post on my personal blog knows that Vera and I were to review a Globusz book together.

She suggested Kama Sutra, which sounded fascinating, but instead we settled on Slips of Speech because Vera felt she needed to brush up her English after 20 years living in a Mediterranean nation (I told Vera I wished most people could match her prose).

Now Vera has taken leave to give more focus to university. She's made the right decision, although I hope to see her back in the Writer's Cafe during the next long uni hols. That leaves me to assess Slips by myself.

I'm well into it, and my first impressions are generally favorable. Questions I hope to answer in my next Writer's Cafe post (by the end of the week, I hope) are:

• Can a book published in the US in 1895 help today's writers and speakers?
• Do you need to know terms like participle and infinitive and gerund to understand Bechtel's advice?
• How does Slips stand up against other books with the same aims – does it complement them, or do others do it all better?
• How sound is the advice? And how easy is the book to use?