Charles Harrington Elster is a writer, broadcaster, and logophilea lover of words. He is the author and narrator of the audio vocabulary-building program Verbal Advantage and the book by the same name. 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; Theres a Word for It, a lighthearted look at unusualand unusually usefulwords; and The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, among others. Charlie was born in New York City in 1957 and earned his BA cum laude from Yale in 1981. He lives in San Diego with his wife and two daughters.