Charles Harrington Elster is a writer, broadcaster, and logophile--a lover of words.He is the author of the popular vocabulary-building program "Verbal Advantage." 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; "What in the Word?" a salmagundi of word lore, wordplay, and advice on usage and pronunciation; and "The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations," now in its second edition, which the late William Safire of The New York Times hailed as "the best survey of the spoken field in years."Charlie's latest book, "The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly," was published in July 2010 by St. Martin's Griffin. He is currently writing a vocabulary-building companion to "Verbal Advantage" called "Word Workout." Charlie was a consultant for "Garner's Modern American Usage" and the pronunciation editor for the seventh and eighth editions of "Black's Law Dictionary." He was a guest contributor to William Safire's "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine, and his articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, 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.