All You Create

For those who don’t know me well, I will share this morsel with you:

I’m all about food.

Granted, I’m a pescetarian — someone who doesn’t eat land animals (e.g., chicken, cow, pig, sheep, etc.) — but I do eat seafood and fish, in addition to fruits, dairy products, grains and the occasional vegetable. And tomatoes? They’re OK, I suppose. I’ve eaten them my entire life but haven’t really been in awe of them.

Not, that is, until the past decade, when a friend introduced me to Insalata Caprese. Now, I’m hooked.

Insalata Caprese translates from Italian into English thus:

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It’s 11:10 p.m. A little while ago, I decided to write a quick blog post and so looked up a few things, trying to decide what to write about. Then I remembered something I had learned in school a long time ago: The difference between the term Asian and Oriental. Yep, that’d make a quick post.

But then I thought, hey, that class was awhile ago and I better double-check what I think I know in case I am remembering it wrong. And wammo! No more quick-and-easy post.

What I learned years ago was this:

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Leave it to one-time presidential-hopeful Sarah Palin to continually provide grammar fodder for the media, as well as for bloggers (such as yours truly), Facebook addicts and Twitter hounds alike.

This past Sunday, Palin tweeted the following:

“Ground Zero Mosque supporters, doesn’t it stab you in the heart as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, please refudiate.”

The popular assumption running around the Internet is that someone pointed the fact that “refudiate” isn’t a dictionary-recognized word to Palin, who then deleted the first tweet and entered a new, presumably more-correct version:

“Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real.”

The second version isn’t much better than the first — and that’s without even getting into the politics of what she’s trying, very unsuccessfully, to get across.

Palin was probably trying to use “repudiate” but may have been thinking about the word “refute” and, not fully comprehending (ahem) the distinction between the two, blended them into “refudiate.” Whether by accident or on purpose, the tweeted goof made far-reaching news.

Let’s look at the three words:

Refudiate =

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It’s always a good feeling to receive a message from a friend that includes, among other things, an idea for a Bloody Well Write segment. This short-but-sweet post is a result of just such a message.

Peel = a verb meaning to cut or strip off the outer layer of something, such as …

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Here’s a short, to-the-point entry for your post-July 4th enjoyment.

Alongside, adjacent and adjoining are all words that could be mistaken for synonyms, but they have distinct meanings:

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I never thought about it before I became a proofreader more than a decade ago. I’d venture to guess that most people don’t think about it, either, or ever will. And yet now that I know the difference, it bugs me enough to write an entry on it.

On what?

On the copyright symbol — © — and the redundant use of the word copyright alongside the symbol.

If you look at the copyright information on just about anything, you may very well see something like this:

Copyright © 1989, 1996 by  …. (This particular instance is from the parenting book “What to Expect the First Year.”)

The problem with the above information is that it is repeating the idea of copyright: the word, then the symbol. It’s akin to  “I’d like $40 dollars, please.” The dollar sign ($) and the word dollars mean exactly the same thing, so if you said it out loud, you’d say, “I’d like dollars 40 dollars, please.” You see the ick factor, grammatically speaking, yes?

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