Powerful

这不是一本教你为GRE突击背单词的书，恰恰相反，它反复提醒读者：别急着用新词，更别用词去炫技、去 impress 别人。作者把'People judge you by the words you use'奉为信条，却把重心放在如何让词汇真正长进心里——按难度递进、在语境里反复遇见、靠同反义与读音辨析来巩固。读者最买账的，正是这种'一坨一坨记'而非逐个死记的编排，以及书中近乎执拗的语言洁癖与自嘲口吻。它适合那些背过无数单词书、却始终记不牢、并对'说话是否清晰'这件事较真的人。它不承诺十七天速成，只承诺：慢下来，扎实地走完每一步。

Charles Harrington Elster is a writer, broadcaster, and logophile—a lover of words. He is the author and narrator of the audio vocabulary-building program Verbal Advantage and the book by the same name. His other books include Tooth and Nail and Test of Time, vocabulary-building novels for high school students preparing to take the college entrance exams; There's a Word for It, a lighthearted look at unusual—and unusually useful—words; and The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, which William Safire of The New York Times hailed as "the best survey of the spoken field in years." In 2005 Harcourt published What in the Word? Wordplay, Word Lore, and Answers to Your Peskiest Questions About Language, and in 2006 Houghton Mifflin released the second edition of The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, featuring nearly 200 new entries. Charlie was pronunciation editor of the seventh and eighth editions of Black's Law Dictionary and a consultant for Garner's Modern American Usage. He is a guest contributor to the "On Language" column of The New York Times Magazine, and his articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and other publications. Charlie has also been talking about language on the radio since 1985. He has been interviewed on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Weekend Edition, and All Things Considered and been a guest on hundreds of radio shows around the country. For five and a half years he cohosted a weekly public radio talk show on language called A Way with Words. Charlie was born in New York City in 1957 and earned his B.A. cum laude from Yale in 1981. He lives in San Diego with his wife and two daughters.