Next to Edgar Allan Poe and maybe Stephen King, Ambrose Bierce is America’s greatest writer of horror stories. This is the time of year to enjoy spooky stuff, so try “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Bierce is also remembered for The Devil’s Dictionary, a scalding work that defines “politics,” for example, as a “strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

Less well known, but also worth dipping into, is a compendium of words and phrases Bierce found objectionable called Write It Right. It is available for free online, but a small hardcover edition, very intelligently edited by Jan Freeman, was published in 2009, a century later.

A poet, Boston Globe columnist and blogger, Freeman defines good writing as “clear thinking made visible,” which is as useful a definition as I’ve ever seen. Freeman’s appreciation of the comedy in what the strenuously disdainful Bierce did in this little work keeps her astute commentary from being dull and pedantic.

Bierce made his contribution at the same time that hundreds of other usage books were appearing, in part because thousands of Americans, Freeman writes, were “both freed and unsettled by the kind of social and geographical mobility Bierce enjoyed [and] looked for guidance on proper speaking and writing in the shifting landscape.”

The list of proscribed words that Bierce compiled shows, among other things, that most quarrels over proper usage “die a natural death,” and here’s an example. A Victorian in many of his attitudes, Bierce found “pants” to be “vulgar exceedingly.” The proper word was “trousers.” As might be expected, he disapproved of slang, which, in The Devil’s Dictionary, he defined as “the grunt of the human pig (pignoramus intolerabilis).”

But like all really first-rate writers, Bierce also detested genteel euphemisms and pretentiousness. He didn’t like “gubernatorial,” for instance, but I don’t know how we would write about politics these days without it. Freeman says this adjective “seems to be based on the nonexistent Latin gubernatorius,” which indicates how absurdly highfalutin it was when it first came into use.

Here’s what Bierce had to say about “gubernatorial”: “Eschew it; it is … needless and bombastic. Leave it to those who call a political office a ‘chair.’ ‘Gubernatorial chair’ is good enough for them. So is hanging.”

ANNOYING WORD OF THE MONTH: Forever. Defending the withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden says he wants to end “forever wars.” The sentiment is laudable, though I wish he had explained his reasoning in words that didn’t immediately call to mind an abandoned puppy welcomed into a new and presumably permanent home. Unfortunately, “forever” seems to be the word of the hour, displacing — at long last — the infinitely irritating “epicenter.” Foreign Affairs is fretting about the “forever virus,” while Financial Times tells us Wall Street is embracing the “forever CEO.” I’m writing this in my “forever jeans,” of course, so I guess I’d better get over it.