“Commit Suicide. Instead if ‘He committed suicide,’ say, He killed himself, or, He took his life. For married we do not say ‘committed matrimony.’ Unfortunately most of us do say ‘got married,’ which is almost as bad. For lack of a suitable verb we just sometimes say committed this or that, as in the instance of bigamy, for the verb to bigam is a blessing that is still in store for us.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
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