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Text of the page (random words):
mmonly dashes for example later on the same page as the passage quoted above there is the following sentence victor lasky who had bombarded jfk with hostile quotes of all kinds in his book on the late president in 1963 appeared to have mixed feelings about quotemanship in 1965 4 here the noun is the proper name at the beginning and the adjective clause is the long phrase that follows the noun and is set off from the rest of the sentence by commas so much for grammar since the adjective clause in the above passage follows directly after calhoun s name and is set off by commas it appears at first glance that it must be modifying calhoun however given that calhoun died long before the reviewed book was written historical knowledge together with common sense indicates that this was probably not what the author intended reading the above passage the historically informed reader searches for another noun for the adjective clause to modify and finds coit s name back at the beginning of the sentence this sentence is an example of what is called a misplaced modifier 5 where should the adjective clause have been placed there s more than one way to do it but here s one possibility but the pulitzer prize winning author of a biography of john c calhoun margaret l coit who had reviewed the white book elsewhere wrote the times to take sharp exception to galbraith s point of view it s important to note that the original sentence is not ungrammatical rather the grammar of the sentence seems to say something that the author didn t intend how do we know he didn t intend it because dead men don t review books notes paul f boller jr quotemanship the use and abuse of quotations for polemical and other purposes 1967 p 402 gerald m capers john c calhoun encyclopaedia britannica 3 27 2026 robert j gula precision a reference handbook for writers 1980 p 255 loc cit gula op cit pp 54 55 april 15th 2026 permalink you don t say there is no foreign institution with which in any basic sense the american presidency can be compared because basically there is no comparable foreign institution the president of the united states is both more and less than a king he is also both more and less than a prime minister 1 the following blurb is from the front cover of a sax rohmer novel 2 one of the greats of horror fiction san francisco examiner notice that greats is in quotation marks within the quotation marks so whoever wrote this comment for the san francisco examiner was not calling rohmer one of the greats but quoting someone else i would suspect that the quote was made up by the publisher except for the inner quotation marks which suggest irony i doubt whether anyone even in 1962 would have seriously thought rohmer was a great of horror fiction or any other genre unfortunately it would be hard to check the quote to see if its context is actually a favorable review of the book since the citation only gives the name of the newspaper with no date or page and the book in question was published in 1962 rohmer s novel was originally published in 1932 3 so there s a thirty year span in which the quote might have been made the examiner quote was probably the best that could be found and the publisher hoped that the potential reader wouldn t notice the quotation marks around greats riddle me this what ancient invention makes it possible for people to walk through solid walls click on the button below to see the answer answer doors this is a variation of a riddle usually asking what invention lets people see through solid walls you should be able to figure that out on your own 4 notes harold j laski the american presidency an interpretation 1943 p 23 i found the first sentence of this quote in paul f boller jr quotemanship the use and abuse of quotations for polemical and other purposes 1967 p 253 sax rohmer the mask of fu manchu pyramid books 1962 ibid p 4 if not see david j bodycombe the riddles of the sphinx 2007 pp 352 556 april 4th 2026 permalink w retch w hen i spot an error like this egregious misspelling from yes the new yorker a fter drinking it i wondered for several moments if i would wretch my blood begins to boil or at least come to a simmer you could poach an egg in 1 a wretch may retch you may feel wretched while retching and reading the wretched of the earth may make you retch but not all who retch are wretches the error in the new yorker that florey was referring to in the quote above was that of putting a w on the beginning of the final word despite the fact that retch and wretch are pronounced exactly the same and differ in spelling only by that silent w the two words belong to distinct grammatical categories wretch is a noun referring to a person in a wretched condition that is miserable 2 whereas retch is a verb for vomiting or alternatively what is called dry heaving that is trying to vomit but not succeeding 3 so the author of the article that florey quoted may have felt wretched or like a wretch but that was because he felt as though he would retch i decided to run the sentence with the misspelling by gpt 5 mini to see how it compared to the new yorker s vaunted fact checking department this is the magazine s own term for it 4 and here is that exchange me can you check a sentence for grammar and spelling gpt 5 mini sure paste the sentence and i ll check it me the nose was almost nonexistent but after drinking it i wondered for several moments if i would wretch 5 gpt 5 mini corrected sentence the nose was almost nonexistent but after drinking it i wondered for several moments whether i would wretch notes changed if to whether for formality clarity wretch is uncommon if you meant retch to vomit use retch instead example with that change the nose was almost nonexistent but after drinking it i wondered for several moments whether i would retch 6 the change of if to whether is unnecessary but a stylistic improvement in my opinion but the problem with wretch is not that it s uncommon it s that it s ungrammatical and not what the author meant still gpt 5 mini did better than the new yorker s presumably human editors since it at least suggested the proper correction in the end are there layoffs in the magazine s vaunted department in the future the confusion of the two words is not common enough to be mentioned in any of the reference books i usually consult but if it s good enough for the new yorker that s good enough for me notes kitty burns florey sister bernadette s barking dog the quirky history and lost art of diagramming sentences 2006 p 116 wretch cambridge dictionary accessed 4 1 2026 retch cambridge dictionary accessed 4 1 2026 zach helfand the history of the new yorker s vaunted fact checking department the new yorker 8 25 2025 there s an amphiboly in this headline is it the fact checking that is vaunted or the department jack turner green gold the return of absinthe the new yorker 3 6 2006 the misspelling is still uncorrectd private chat with gpt 5 mini 3 29 2026 april 1st 2026 permalink from the e mailbag a reader writes to ask if i ride my bicycle one mile at thirty miles per hour mph to the top of a hill how fast will i have to coast down the other side for a mile to average sixty mph for the whole two mile trip a friend told me ninety mph but i can t get the math to work help can you solve the reader s problem hint what is the date of this entry solution it s impossible explanation to average sixty mph he would have to cover the two miles at an average of a mile a minute which would take two minutes however it took him two minutes to climb to the top of the hill at thirty mph therefore he would have to cover the second mile instanteously which is not possible even going downhill disclaimer disclosure this puzzle is fictional as is the e mail this is my version of a traditional gotcha puzzle often given in terms of a one mile race track i d seen it before but was reminded of it by the following book david j bodycombe the riddles of the sphinx 2007 pp 276 536 march 19th 2026 permalink new book i told you so quote science is going to be critical for tackling the big challenges that our society faces we need it operating at its best to tackle these problems and while science might look like a well oiled machine spitting out findings to those glancing at it from the outside it looks more like a clunky old engine prone to breakdown to those of us on the inside in the pages ahead i am going to show how science rather than being immune to the passions and politics of the outside world as it is meant to be is shaped by these influences and increasingly being threatened by them this is to all of our detriment yet just because this is the way things have been does not meant this is the way they must remain by studying how science has gone wrong in the past and is going increasingly wrong today we can learn how to keep it from going wrong in the future 1 title i told you so subtitle scientists who were ridiculed exiled and imprisoned for being right author matt kaplan comment kaplan is a journalist specializing in science who writes for the economist magazine i may have read some of his journalism but if so i don t remember he s also written or co written three previous books none of which i ve read 2 date 2026 summary i just got my hands on an actual old fashioned paper copy of this book and have only just begun reading it based on the subtitle and what little i ve read so far the book appears to be a history of scientists who met social political or religious resistance to their discoveries kaplan writes copernicus feared how the outside world would respond to his discovery that the earth went around the sun and hid his notes away in a desk drawer he kept them unpublished until he was so seriously ill that he was certain he would be dead before the inquisition could come for him contrary to popular legend darwin did not really fear that the public would lynch him for his theory of evolution so much as worry that the rest of the academic community would think less of him for coming up with such a wild idea others carefully managed their relations with the outside world galileo had to consider the church with every step that he took joseph lister and louis pasteur didn t hide their findings but political games were essential to their survival 3 we d like to believe that sort of thing no longer happens in these enlightened times unfortunately the political games are not over and i assume that kaplan will discuss some more recent cases of science being delayed or nearly derailed by political or religious opposition the blurbs the book is positively blurbed by bill bryson the author of one of my favorite reference books on easily confused words 4 disclaimer i haven t read this book yet and therefore can neither review nor recommend it but it looks interesting enough to me to read and i thought others might also be interested i may review the book in the near future if i have anything interesting to say about it or at least if i think i do notes pp xvi xvii paragraphing suppressed citations to page numbers are to the new book p 270 pp xv xvi bryson s dictionary of troublesome words a writer s guide to getting it right 2002 march 8th 2026 permalink how to lie with notes 6 the phantom reference menace in previous entries 1 we ve looked at how scholarly works or non scholarly works trying to pass as scholarly can have too few notes or too many now it s time to turn to the ways in which individual notes can mislead we tend to rely on the notes of a scholarly work to support its claims but they don t always do so few of us check notes and even those of us who sometimes do so don t check them all many books that include notes often have too many to check so misleading notes may go unrecognized which just encourages those who resort to them a phantom reference is not a ghost note which is a non existent note but an existing note that cites a non existent work while there probably were cases of phantom references in the mountain of pre 21st century literature i expect that citations to non existent works were uncommon until recently a previous entry discussed a phantom reference from this century in fact a quite recent one but one that appears to have resulted from a typographical error in the citation 2 in the current century phantom references are becoming a more serious problem especially with the rising use of so called artificial intelligence ai ai programs have a tendency to cook up references to non existent articles and books 3 which is called hallucinating and some humans use such hallucinations without bothering to check them why ai does this is an interesting question but one that is beyond the concern of this entry however we don t need to know why we just need to know that it does so and take steps to avoid falling into the trap of accepting such hallucinated references ultimately the responsibility is on the human author if such fake citations make their way into a published work if you use ai to draft an article or book for you or just the references for one it s up to you to check that those references are for real 4 one reason that the phantom reference has become such a growing menace to 21st century scholarship is that it can always be blamed on the ai in the past a note to a fake work would have likely been a career killer for a scholar using manufactured citations is as much scholarly malpractice as plagiarism and should be punished as severely another basis for the rise in phantom references is the slighly less egregious practice of copying references from other works 5 once a non existent source is cited in the notes of one author s work other authors may beef up their references by simply copying those citations without checking them for authenticity if an ai generated hallucination is hiding in that work s notes it is likely to spread through other works like a virus in the past this may have been a relatively harmless practice since phantom notes were uncommon but it always violated the principle that references should be to works that are used as sources obviously you can t have used a non existent work as a source moreover copying sources from related works is a pseudo scholarly practice that makes it look like the author has done more research than the reality it s lazy as well finally at the risk of repeating myself it s more important than ever for readers to randomly check at least a few notes in current research papers and scholarly works before relying on them the phantom reference problem is likely to get worse as more researchers use ai to help them quickly and easily produce publishable articles notes i ve intentionally included one phantom reference in the following notes see if you can find it for previous entries in this series see introduction 10 23 2025 latin abbreviations 11 15 2025 anatomy of a citation 12 6 2025 ghost notes 1 3 2026 death by footnote 2 9 2026 see striking a false note 7 16 2025 the curre...