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Quotes from Famous Authors
"The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man."
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
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picnic time
It's picnic time across America. Pack the brains, gather up the smarts, spread out on your desk and try these words.
1. aedes: (a) any of a genus of fiercely stinging omnivorous ants; (b) an acute gastrointestinal disorder caused by bacteria resulting from unrefrigerated mayonnaise; (c) any of a genus of mosquitoes including the vector of yellow fever, dengue, and other diseases; (d) a stew or thick soup of meat and vegetables originally served at outdoor gatherings.
2. formic acid: (a) a colorless pungent fuming vesicant liquid acid CH2O2 found especially in ants and in many plants and used chiefly in dyeing and finishing textiles; (b) insecticide; (c) bee venom; (d) essentially what mayonnaise turns into if left in direct sunlight.
3. muffuletta: (a) a sandwich especially of lamb and beef, tomato, onion, and yogurt sauce on pita bread; (b) a sandwich made with round Italian bread and filled usually with cold cuts, cheese, and olive salad; (c) a sandwich consisting of thinly sliced beef topped with melted cheese and condiments (as fried onions or peppers); (d) a sandwich of mustard and lettuce.
4. marquisette: (a) a sheer meshed fabric used for clothing, curtains, and mosquito nets; (b) an aromatic North American mint that has blue or violet flowers borne in axillary tufts and yields an oil used in folk medicine or to drive away mosquitoes; (c) a picnic basket; (d) the person at the company picnic who always wins all the contests.
5. diluvial: (a) many; numerous; (b) relating to or being a picnic set up on the tailgate especially of a station wagon; (c) of, relating to, or brought about by a flood; (d) a wicker basket, carried by a single curved handle, with two flat hinged doors, one on each end of the top, commonly used for toting picnic material.
6. thunderstroke: (a) the condition of fainting for fear of loud thunder; (b) a stroke of or as if of lightning with the attendant thunder; (c) a bird that causes lightning and thunder in American Indian myth; (d) the latest ride from Harley-Davidson.
7. burgoo: (a) a stew or thick soup of meat and vegetables originally served at outdoor gatherings; (b) a hamburger served on a bun made of corn chips; (c) a fire built outdoors (as at a camp or a picnic); (d) (Australia) an excursion or outing with food usually provided by members of the group and eaten in the open.
8. Citrullus lanatus: (a) pear; (b) watermelon; (c) strawberries; (d) saffron.
9. pullet: (a) a wooden rack used to transport food in open spaces; (b) a suckling pig for roasting on a spit; (c) a soup or sauce made of chicken, veal, or fish stock and cream and thickened with butter and flour; (d) a young hen; specifically, a hen of the domestic chicken less than a year old.
10. paucity: (a) a concept city in California, populated with dogs, only dogs; (b) the quality, state, or fact of being rare; (c) a picnic or supper featuring fried fish; (d) smallness of quantity, as in "can't find any more strange picnic words."
If errors in printed publications are besetting you like ants at a picnic, ProofreadNOW has the perfect spot for your party to retreat to. We examine the spelling, punctuation, and clarity of your ad, proposal, Web page, brochure, or anything else in print. We're already making sure that the napkins were packed, the cutlery is clean and ready to go, and the paper plates are those stiff, reliable ones rather than the flimsy ones that spill all your chicken.
1:c 2:a 3:b 4:a 5:c 6:b 7:a 8:b 9:d 10:d Rate Yourself: You're the type to forget the day of the company picnic...on the day of the company picnic.
3 to 5 correct: You'll forget the blanket.
6 to 7 correct: You'll forget the lemonade.
8 to 9 correct: You'll remember the chicken.
All 10 correct: You'll even remember the salt and pepper!
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| Weekly Grammar Tip |
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Flammable, inflammable; Flout, flaunt.
These two words were under discussion at ProofreadNOW recently, as they were misused in customer documents. (Or were they? That was the question.) The document was legal in nature, so we referred to Garner's Modern American Usage, the standard for law-firm style. Garner writes:
Flammable, inflammable. The first is now accepted as standard in American English and British English alike. Though examples of its use date back to 1813, in recent years it has become widespread as a substitute for inflammable, in which some people mistook the prefix in- to be negative rather than intensive. Traditionally, the forms were inflammable and noninflammable; today they are flammable and nonflammable. By the mid-20th century, purists had lost the fight to retain the older forms.
Even staunch descriptivists endorsed the prescriptive shift from inflammable to flammable--e.g.: "A word is bad if it is ambiguous to such a degree that it leads to misunderstanding. For me, the perfect example of such a word is flammable, if it is applied to substances. As most dictionaries now recognize, inflammable can be confused with non-combustible, and so lead to accidents." Archibald A. Hill, "Bad Words, Good Words, Misused Words," in Studies in English Linguistics for Randolph Quirk 250, 252 (1983).
Flaunt, flout. Confusion about these terms is so distressingly common that some dictionaries have thrown in the towel and now treat flaunt as a synonym of flout. Flout means "to contravene or disregard; to treat with contempt." Flaunt means "to show off or parade (something) in an ostentatious manner," but is often incorrectly used for flout, perhaps because it is misunderstood as a telescoped version of flout and taunt--e.g.: "In Washington, the White House issued a statement that deplored the Nigerian Government's 'flaunting [read flouting] of even the most basic international norms and universal standards of human rights.'" Howard W. French, "Nigeria Executes Critic of Regime; Nations Protest," N.Y. Times, 11 Nov. 1995, at A1.
Of course, flaunt is more often used correctly--e.g.:
"Most vivid among the gaggle of grandchildren are the trashy and very available Dori (Maria Mervis), complete with body-flaunting garb; [and others]." Christopher Rawson, "Putting the Fun in Funeral," Pitt. Post-Gaz., 23 May 1997, at 30.
"He donates millions to religious and charitable groups, yet flaunts his own wealth." Marc Gunther, "Will Uncle Bud Sell Hollywood?" Fortune, 18 Aug. 1997, at 185.
Flout, meanwhile, almost never causes a problem. Here it's correctly used: "A record rider turnout, fueled by the mayor's earlier pledge to end the escort and crack down on cyclists flouting traffic laws, poured into the streets on an improvised route." Chuck Finnie & Rachel Gordon, "Critical Mass Reaches Another Fork in the Road," S.F. Examiner, 3 Aug. 1997, at B1. But the rare mistake of misusing flout for flaunt does sometimes occur--e.g.: "Mr. Talton was soon joined by almost two dozen other conservative Republicans who filed en masse into the clerk's office to flout [read flaunt] their disapproval for their colleague and fellow party member." Christy Hoppe, "GOP Shows Off Its Own Defection," Dallas Morning News, 25 May 2000, at A33, A35.
One federal appellate judge who misused flaunt for flout in a published opinion--only to be sic'd and corrected by judges who later quoted him--appealed to W3 [the Web] and its editors, who, of course, accept as standard any usage that can be documented with any frequency at all. The judge then attempted to justify his error and pledged to persist in it. See William Safire, I Stand Corrected 158-159 (1984). Seeking refuge in a nonprescriptive dictionary, however, merely ignores the all-important distinction between formal contexts, in which strict standards of usage must apply, and informal contexts, in which venial faults of grammar or usage may, if we are lucky, go unnoticed (or unmentioned). Judges' written opinions fall into the first category.
Source: Garner's Modern American Usage, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 352-3.
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| Word of the Week |
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deus ex machina
Pronunciation: DAY-es eks MAA-ken-ah
Function: noun
Etymology: New Latin, a god from a machine, translation of Greek theos ek mechanes
Date: 1697
Definitions:
1: a god introduced by means of a crane in ancient Greek and Roman drama to decide the final outcome
2: a person or thing (as in fiction or drama) that appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty
Example: "He would replace natural gas in electricity production with wind, and use the natural gas to power cars. He fails to mention any practical theory of how to get there--that would really be "a plan." Instead, he relies on the deus ex machina of Congress, waving a legislative wand to make people do things they would choose not to do, given the extravagant and unjustified costs involved."
-Holman Jenkins, WSJ, p. A13, 8/6/08.
Definition source: Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary.
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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.
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