At the age of 15, I discovered that my primary intellectual interest wasn’t paleontology or the intricacies of golf (as I’d earlier thought), but the use of the English language. It’s a passion that might be partly genetic. My paternal grandfather had more than a passing interest in language, and this was magnified three or four times in my father, a true language aficionado. And then, as my father tells it, the English-language bug seemed to be magnified a hundredfold in me: it became all-consuming. This passion has taken various forms at different times in my life. At 15 it was largely a matter of vocabulary-building. Then I discovered general semantics in books by S.I. Hayakawa, Wendell Johnson, Stuart Chase, and Alfred Korzybski. Because I grew up in a university town, small though it was, these and other books were readily accessible. I read everything I could find on the subject. Then when I was 16, on a wintry evening while visiting New Mexico, I discovered Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage. I was enthralled. Never had I held a more exciting book. I spent hours reading his advice on the effective use of words and his essays on everything from Johnsonese to précis writing. He had a terrific entry on why you should never use utilize. He kept mentioning another author, by the name of Fowler, so when I got back to Texas I sought out Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. That book turned out to be even better. By the time I was 18, I had committed to memory most of Fowler, Partridge, and their successors: the Evanses, Bernstein, Follett, and Copperud. I knew where they differed, and I came to form opinions about whose positions were soundest on all sorts of editorial and linguistic issues. I still refer to the work of those writers, even though I bring a greater level of empiricism to the issues than they were able to. College presented a wealth of opportunities. At the University of Texas, I studied Latin, French, and the history of the English language, including the Latin and Greek element in English. Two summers at Oxford University—where I studied Chaucer and T.S. Eliot—deepened my appreciation of how language and literature intersect. Much of my senior thesis, titled “Shakespeare’s Latinate Diction,” ended up being published in several articles that appeared in literary and linguistic journals. My first book I began writing as a first-year law student—during the first week, in fact, as I discovered the new and specialized vocabulary of law. It became what is now, in its third edition, called Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage. It was inspired by Fowler. Then came The Elements of Legal Style, inspired by Strunk and White. Many others have followed—books on jurisprudence and advocacy and legislation and even golf. And of course Black’s Law Dictionary, which I’ve re-researched and rewritten from top to bottom over the course of four unabridged editions. If I’m allowed to have parental favorites, they’re Garner’s Modern English Usage, Reading Law (coauthored with Justice Antonin Scalia), and The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation. Please don’t tell the others I said so.