 |
 |
|
Fortunate and Fortuitous
Guideline: Use fortuitous to describe those events that happen by chance. Avoid its use as an all-purpose synonym for fortunate, which can be used to describe situations or events that are either planned or unplanned.
It was fortunate [a good thing] that we had enough time to iron out our differences. And how fortuitous [a lucky thing] it was that we bumped into JoJo and Kate before we left.
|
|
|
 |
|
March winds...
It's another random week, with words from all over. Or are they? Take your best shot.
1. John Kufuor: (a) the British shadow prime minister; (b) assistant secretary general of the UN; (c) Oxford-educated president of Ghana; (d) Obama's top pick for running mate.
2. Regency: (a) of, relating to, or characteristic of the styles of George IV's regency as Prince of Wales during the period 1811-20; (b) the British war cabinet leader; (c) the governor of a country or province who rules as the representative of a king or sovereign; (d) a military unit consisting usually of a number of battalions.
3. beltway: (a) ancient paved highway extending from Rome to the Adriatic; (b) the political and social world of Washington, D.C., viewed especially as insular and exclusive; (c) a ship's stairway from one deck to another; (d) a belt loop.
4. Kamehameha Day: (a) June 11 observed as a holiday in Hawaii in commemoration of the birthday of Kamehameha I; (b) Hawaiian New Year's Day; (c) Hawaiian Christmas; (d) Hawaiian election day.
5. fortified wine: (a) wine to which vitamin B12 has been added, to increase shelf life and to enhance the nutritional value; (b) a liquid made usually with water, white wine, vegetables, and seasonings and used to poach fish; (c) a wine (as sherry) to which alcohol usually in the form of grape brandy is added during or after fermentation; (d) a dry or sweet aperitif wine flavored with aromatic herbs and often used in mixed drinks.
6. altruism: (a) attachment or allegiance to the traditions, interests, or ideals of one's native land; (b) unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others; (c) a geological doctrine that changes in the earth's crust have in the past been brought about suddenly by physical forces operating in ways that cannot be observed today; (d) a system under which an authority undertakes to supply needs or regulate conduct of those under its control in matters affecting them as individuals as well as in their relations to authority and to each other.
7. fungo: (a) any of a kingdom of saprophytic and parasitic spore-producing eukaryotic typically filamentous organisms formerly classified as plants that lack chlorophyll and include molds, rusts, mildews, smuts, mushrooms, and yeasts; (b) a fly ball hit especially for practice fielding by a player who tosses a ball in the air and hits it as it comes down; (c) a swindling game or scheme; (d) a game in which each player swings a horse chestnut on a string to try to break one held by the opponent.
8. cotillion: (a) the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses; (b) an elaborate dance with frequent changing of partners carried out under the leadership of one couple at formal balls; (c) a 17th century French dance usually in quick duple time; (d) an Italian dance with a lively hop step beginning each measure.
9. ensign: (a) a flagpole on a ship; (b) a sailor responsible for hoisting the colors prior to battle; (c) an aide or representative of another in the performance of duty; (d) a flag that is flown (as by a ship) as the symbol of nationality and that may also be flown with a distinctive badge added to its design.
10. skeigh (pronounced skeek): (a) short; (b) proudly spirited; (c) restrained by anticipation of shame; (d) being in the state of dying.
If errors in printed publications are blowing your customers away with the March winds, ProofreadNOW has a calming effect on your environment, making the winds cease and keeping the storms over the horizon, where they can bother someone else. We examine the spelling, punctuation, and clarity of your ad, proposal, Web page, brochure, or anything else in print. We're here for you 24/7, with one-hour turnaround when necessary.
Answers: 1:c 2:a 3:b 4:a 5:c 6:b 7:b 8:b 9:d 10:b Rate Yourself: Your mind was a terrible thing to waste.
3 to 5 correct: There's hope for you.
6 to 7 correct: Better than average.
8 to 9 correct: Perfection is elusive.
All 10 correct: Smaht. Very smaht.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Weekly Grammar Tip |
|
William F. Buckley, RIP
GT gives this space up this week as a tribute to William F. Buckley, master of the English language, and from whom we often take our word of the week. Helpful grammar tips will return in the next issue.
------------------------------------------------
William F. Buckley Jr.: the Patriarch of the Modern U.S. Right and a Polemicist, TV Presenter, and Author
By Godfrey Hodgson, The Guardian UK
Thursday 28 February 2008
William F Buckley Jr., who has died aged 82 after suffering from diabetes and emphysema, was one of the most important builders of the conservative ascendancy in America. His great single achievement was to make intellectual conservatism respectable for the first time for a generation. He did this through his own spiky but elegant polemical writings and through the magazine he founded in 1955, National Review, which fused together the warring tribes of the American right and gave encouragement to an entire generation of rightwingers.
In his television show Firing Line (1966-99), he became the most feared controversialist in America. Kind and generous in private, Buckley could be sarcastic and cruel in defence of his beliefs. His gladiatorial contests on air reached a climax in an infamous row with Gore Vidal in 1968. When Vidal persisted in suggesting that Buckley's views made him something close to a fascist, Buckley burst out: "Now, listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the face!" Buckley was ashamed of himself for losing control, and developed a gentler style.
He loved to shock those he regarded as wimpish liberals, but it was important to him to present himself as a gentleman. He was a man of culture, a gifted writer and brilliant debater, and a sincere Catholic. He was also an accomplished pianist, and from 1976 onwards wrote a series of popular novels about CIA agent Blackford Oakes. In all, he produced more than 40 books and 5,600 of his biweekly newspaper columns, On the Right. A keen sailor, Buckley made a number of voyages, across the Atlantic and the Pacific, in large yachts loaded with friends, vintage wine, hundreds of hours of taped Mozart and Motown, word processors (for captain and crew to write their books on) and a piano for the captain's Bach.
Born in Manhattan, he was the sixth child of Will Buckley, a Texas Irishman who made and lost a fortune in Mexican oil and then made it back in Venezuela. Buckley Sr rescued priests during the Mexican revolution and brought up his children to think of themselves as counter-revolutionaries. After taking the children to live in Mexico, France and England, he settled on an estate in rural Connecticut.
Buckley Sr resembled his contemporary Joseph Kennedy in that he was a self-made Irish millionaire, anti-communist and isolationist who had a fierce determination that his children must succeed in competition with the Protestant elite. Young William's older sister recalled that they were given professional instruction in "apologetics, art, ballroom dancing, banjo, bird-watching" and so on alphabetically for a long paragraph to "tennis, typing and tap-dancing."
Buckley Sr was a bigot who sent his children (not including Bill) to burn a cross, symbol of the Ku Klux Klan, on the lawn of a Jewish hotel. Like Kennedy, he was also an Anglophobe. Young William rejected his father's anti-semitism and was ambivalent about things English. He retained for life the slight English accent he acquired at the Catholic public school, Beaumont, which he attended from 1938 to 1939. He had many English friends, especially the historian Alistair Horne. But he derived glee from having Blackford Oakes sleep with the Queen of England.
The young Buckley was deeply influenced by his father's friend Albert Jay Nock, a defrocked Anglican clergyman. In an autobiography called The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Nock expressed contempt for the democracy and "economism" of the modern American world. He borrowed from the prophet Isaiah the idea that people such as himself and the Buckleys were a "remnant" who would fail to persuade their contemporaries but would influence generations to come.
After war service in the army (1944-46), Buckley studied political science, economics and history at Yale. He was a member of the elite insiders' club, Skull and Bones; star of the debating team (he won a famous victory over the Oxford team of Robin Day and Tony Benn); and editor of the Yale Daily News. After graduating in 1950, he met his sister's tall and beautiful friend Pat Taylor, daughter of a Canadian businessman. He proposed within a week and was accepted. It remained the model of a happy marriage. She died last April; their son Christopher survives them both.
Once he had left Yale, he wrote a caustic attack on the university's lack of religious faith, a book called God and Man at Yale (1951). Yale reacted with fury. When it put up McGeorge Bundy, later President Kennedy's national security adviser, to denounce him as a "twisted and ignorant young man," Buckley's name was made.
After a brief stint as a CIA agent in Mexico - where his boss was the future Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt - he co-wrote a provocative apologia for the liberals' bete noire, McCarthy and his Enemies (1959), about the witch-hunting senator from Wisconsin.
He founded National Review with a gifted and pugnacious team of editors, many of them converts from the left. They included Whittaker Chambers, an ex-communist who was the denouncer of Alger Hiss in the high profile trial of the McCarthy years; the talented ex-Trotskyite James Burnham; and another American ex-communist, Frank Meyer.
Buckley shone as the ringmaster of this ideological menagerie. National Review's great achievement was to bring together the authoritarian, often intolerant, strand of American conservatism with the libertarian, free-market tradition. The common ground was anti-communism. National Review had many of the faults of the politicised little magazine, including sectarianism and infighting. But countless American conservatives have testified that it made them feel part of a movement that would eventually change society.
By the 1960s, however, Buckley was losing interest in the magazine. He took to spending long holidays near Gstaad, in Switzerland, and worked on a book, to be titled The Revolt Against the Masses, which was never finished. There he made friends with the film star David Niven, and - incongruously - with the arch-liberal Harvard economist, John Kenneth Galbraith.
In 1966 he threw himself into Firing Line, which made him an instant celebrity. He ran for mayor of New York, though with no hope of winning. But increasingly he was more interested in the role of a Manhattan man about town whose speciality was to �pater les bourgeois with patrician arrogance and rightwing insolence.
The election of his friend Ronald Reagan in 1980 restored his reputation and enabled his family to enjoy a celebrity vacation with the Reagans at Claudette Colbert's house in Barbados. But his serious political influence was over. However, he could take consolation from the praise of George Will, National Review's former Washington correspondent, who said he had equipped the Republican party with an "intellectually defensible modern conservatism."
He proclaimed the decline of civilisation, while enjoying the best it had to offer in his big house on the Connecticut shore of Long Island; in Switzerland, which he called the antechamber to heaven; and in the salons and restaurants of Manhattan. His prosperity was dented, but not destroyed, by a series of business rows and reverses.
He will be remembered among other things for his self-deprecating wit. When he was running for mayor, a reporter asked him, "conservatively speaking," how many votes he expected to get. "Conservatively speaking," he replied, "one." "What would you do if you were elected?" the reporter asked. "Demand a recount."
William Francis Buckley Jr, editor, writer and television personality, born November 24, 1925; died February 27, 2008.
|
|
|
| Word of the Week |
|
heuristic
Pronunciation: hyu-RIS-tik
Function: adjective
Etymology: German heuristisch, from New Latin heuristicus, from Greek heuriskein to discover; akin to Old Irish fo-fuair he found
Date: 1821
Definitions: (1) providing aid or direction in the solution of a problem but otherwise unjustified or incapable of justification; (2) heightening curiosity about further scholarly or scientific exploration. Also: of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance, e.g., a heuristic computer program.
Example: "Conservatives know that some human beings, as Albert Jay Nock stressed in his heuristic lectures at the University of Virginia, are educable, others only trainable."
- William F. Buckley (RIP), The Unmaking of a Mayor, The Viking Press, 1966.
|
|
|
|
|
-------------------
Our expert editors are waiting to examine your MS Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Web, or text document. Turnaround times range from an hour to a week, depending on your need. Two editors work on every job, each one going from top to bottom looking for mistakes that would embarrass you and detract from your image of quality and care.
Why not send your annual report, proposal, advertisement, brochure, or other important document to us for a final look? We find mistakes so your customers don't.
Our basic charge is only $11 for each 500-word block of text. That's for 24-hour turnaround. If you want the document sooner, the per-page rate rises, going all the way up to $27 per page for one-hour turnaround. Minimum charges apply, and there are add-ons for certain extra services. Please visit our home page and click the "Prices" tab for details.
Achinta, who works at Tiecas, Inc., a large marketing firm, recently wrote, "You have a very valuable service. It is great to have another set or two of trained eyes to read our copy to improve it and/or correct obvious errors that we had missed, despite having used Word's spelling and grammar tool. The fast turnaround time (including weekends) is incredibly useful in our business when we are always under the deadline gun. Your price is very affordable too."
A client wrote to us recently: "I submitted another job last night and I was so impressed that it was in my e-mail inbox when I got in this morning; and you even checked the website links. The comments were very helpful. We are thrilled, and we plan to use your service again."
Another user wrote: "Every time I work with your company I am more impressed."
If we're not working for you and your company yet, why not? We should be. We'll save you time and you'll be able to do the other things that you do best - such as RAISE REVENUE.
If you like our GrammarTip newsletter, will you please forward it to someone else who might also like it? (The forwarding button is the red bar in the upper left corner of the page.)
Copyright 2008 by ProofreadNOW.com, Inc., 447 Boston Street, Topsfield, MA 01983 USA. Published weekly (we try) by the editors at ProofreadNOW.com, Inc. and sent to customers of record and to opt-in guests. Many readers find it is best to read a portion, put it aside, then come back and read more.
Please rate this GrammarTip (10=high, 0=low):
10 - Like having all your picks win the bowl games.
8 - Like having half the day off after New Year's Day.
6 - Like finding a parking space at the mall.
4 - Like finding a parking space near the mall--across the street.
2 - Like working all day the day after New Year's Day.
0 - Like staying home and forgetting the office was open all day the day after New Year's Day...until they tracked you down.
---------------------- |
|
|
|
