Charles Harrington Elster, a writer who turned a love of the English language into a career that included the public radio show “A Way With Words” and a dozen books about pronunciation, vocabulary and style, died Wednesday at his home in Kensington. He was 65.
The cause of death was cancer, according to his wife, Myrna Zambrano.
By his own ission, Elster was “a man seduced by the sound of syllables and caught in the web of words,” but he wasn’t stuffy about it. His works were for everyday people, and punctuated often by humor.
“When I tell people I’m a writer and they ask what I write, my stock answer is, ‘I write about the English language for a general audience,'” he said on his website. “In other words, I don’t write textbooks and I don’t write academic tomes. I write popular reference books for people who want to learn more words or learn more about words.”
That didn’t mean a lack of seriousness, though — he was respected enough in his chosen field to fill in occasionally for the late William Safire, author for 30 years of the “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine.
Elster was born July 14, 1957, in Queens, N.Y., the only child of Reinhardt Elster, principal harpist for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, and wife Nancy, a piano teacher.
He went to Yale University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in American Studies in 1981. Yale is also where he met his future wife, who told him after graduation that she wanted to return to her hometown, San Diego.
“I think I want to go with you,” he replied, and did. They were married in 1984 and have two daughters, Carmen Elster of Oakland and Judith Elster of Manhattan, N.Y.
After settling here, Elster worked for the now-defunct Kaypro computer company, on a vocabulary-building program. He also started writing books, with the first two, “There Is No Zoo in Zoology” (1988) and “Is There a Cow in Moscow?” (1990) focused on pronunciation, his specialty.
In 1998, he and fellow logophile Richard Lederer began co-hosting “A Way With Words” on KPBS-FM, a weekly show that featured questions from listeners about vocabulary, etymology, puns, grammar, anagrams and other wordplay.
“Charlie’s work on the show was meticulous entertainment,” Lederer said. “He was ionate about language in its many hues, and he was a real communicator with a great voice. Because his parents were musical, that carried over to Charlie and his great ear for the language.”
Elster left the show in 2004 after a dispute with management about the show’s marketing and distribution. “A Way With Words” still airs weekly, with hosts Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and is broadcast on more than 80 stations in more than 40 states.
Losing the show didn’t mean losing his voice. Elster narrated audio books and appeared on other radio programs around the country. He also served on the San Diego city Board of Library Commissioners as it worked toward the new Central Library that opened in 2013.
And he wrote. “Test of Time,” a novel that introduced Mark Twain to the 21st century and high school readers to the words most frequently used in the SAT and ACT exams, came out a few months after he and KPBS parted ways.
It was followed a year later by “What In the Word?” a breezy collection done in a question-and-answer style. In it, Elster was quick to puncture the pompous. “Wrong,” he tells one teacher who believed students were using the word “alternative” incorrectly. “Stop harassing them.”
Later books included “The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly,” which to his chagrin included in its first printing a dozen misspellings of his middle name — Huntington instead of Harrington.
His last book, “How to Tell Fate from Destiny and Other Skillful Word Distinctions,” came out in 2018.
When he wasn’t writing, Elster enjoyed playing blues piano, cooking (especially pasta), and watching the TV show “Jeopardy!”
Services are pending.
