You were indeed mistaken about chaste, but you were quite right about the fluttering dovecote. Like “the house was in an uproar,” it is a simple synecdoche, the container for the thing contained. No problem.
Stephen Orgel
Department of English
Stanford University
Stanford, California
“Anybody can make a mistake.” This plain English observation lacks the classical elegance of “Homer nods.” It’s also less colorful than the Japanese equivalent, Saru mo ki kara ochiru, literally, “Even monkeys fall from trees [sometimes].”
Dr. Glenn Murray
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The thankees are: Joan Houston Hall and Leonard Zwilling of the Dictionary of American Regional English; Fred Mish, Joanne Despres and Jim Lowe of Merriam-Webster; Jesse Sheidlower and Erin McKean of Oxford North America; John Paterson of the OED; Mike Agnes of Webster’s New World; Joe Pickett and David Pritchard of American Heritage; Antonette di Paolo Healey of the Dictionary of Old English; and thankfully back from the dusty shelves of slangdom, Jonathan Lighter, editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang.
Others I call on for lexicographic support or advice include Sol Steinmetz, one of the world’s great lexicographers and my favorite Yiddish expert; Fred Shapiro of the Yale Law Library; Gerald Cohen of the University of Missouri-Rolla; Ron Butters of the University of Georgia; Anne Soukhanov, editor-at-large of Encarta Dictionary; Wendalyn Nichols, formerly of Random House; Allan Metcalf of the American Dialect Society;Victoria Neufeldt of the Dictionary Society of North America; Connie Eble of the University of North Carolina; Bryan Garner, editor of Black’s Law Dictionary and the Dictionary of Modern American Usage; Anatoly Liberman of the University of Minnesota; Paul Dickson; Christine Ammer; John Algeo; David Crystal of the University of North Wales; William Kretzschmar of the Linguistic Atlas project; Wayne Glowka of American Speech; Robert Burchfield, former editor of the OED; Samer Shehata of Georgetown; William Leap of American University; Mohammed Sawaie of the University of Virginia; Ed Callary of the American Name Society; Arnold Zwicky and Geoffrey Nunberg of Stanford; and Constance Hale, Laurence Urdang, Frank Abate, Michael Quinion and Charles Harrington Elster, the pronunciation maven.
My editors at the New York Times Magazine have been Rob Hoerburger, Abbott “Kit” Combs, Jeff Klein, Jaimie Epstein, Bill Ferguson, Jack Rosenthal, Adam Moss, Harvey Shapiro and Michael Molyneaux.
My group at Simon & Schuster includes Gypsy da Silva, Tom Pitoniak, Bill Molesky, Jim Stoller, Anthony Newfield, Barbara Raynor and of course, Michael Korda.
In addition to Kathleen Miller’s research and Jeffrey McQuain’s and Elizabeth Phillips’s language aid, those helping me at the Times’ Washington bureau include my assistant Anne Elise Wort, who keeps her eye out for current words, and Todd Webb, who tries to keep up with both snail mail and e-mail. The bureau’s chief librarian, Barclay Walsh, and the librarians Marjorie Goldsborough and Monica Borkowski are always there to lend a helping hand or foot.
The copy-editing saviors of my political column who have kept the Gotcha! Gang at bay are Steve Pickering, Linda Cohn, Sue Kirby and Karen Freeman.
My gratitude to Jacques Barzun, architect of America’s House of Intellect and a frequent correspondent herein, is expressed in the dedication of this book to him.
Sadly, another friend in usage, Alistair Cooke, died in 2004 at the age of 95. He founded what he called “Sanpickle”—the Safire Nit-pickers League—and I’ll miss his good-humored savaging of my solecisms.
The final thankees are the Lexicographic Irregulars, the Squad Squad and—yes—the Gotcha! Gang.
*Correct in origin, but usage usurped.—W.S.
*See also “Carvilification.”—W.S.
*See also “Chad.”
*Charles P. Tolchin, avatar of optimism, died from complications of his cystic fibrosis on Aug. 7, 2003. I miss him.
*Frederic Cassidy, DARE’s magnificent dialectologist and lexicographer, died June 14, 2000.
*Buckley and I stick together.—W.S.
*Daniel Patrick Moynihan died on March 26, 2003.
*David Guralnik, one of the great lexicographers, died May 19, 2000.
*Joseph Laitin, adviser to six presidents and former ombudsman of the Washington Post, died Jan. 19, 2002.
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