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May 7th, 2025 (Permalink)

"Versus" Vs. "Verses"

I found the following sentence in a book I was recently reading: "Paul Krugman tweeted that 'since Trump seems to have decided that stocks are proof of his success, here's US verses euro stocks over the past year.'"¹ Do you see what's wrong with this sentence? The title of this entry gives it away, but I couldn't resist.

Though the words "verses" and "versus" are pronounced identically, and differ in spelling by only one letter, they do not even belong to the same grammatical category. "Verses" is the plural of the noun "verse"², which usually refers to a line of poetry, a section of a song, or a sentence in a book such as the Bible; whereas "versus" is not a noun but a preposition used to link two nouns that denote opponents in a sporting match, a trial, or some other competition³. In the context of Krugman's sentence, the two noun phrases that should be linked by "versus" are "US [stocks]" and "euro stocks". Also, it's "versus" that "vs.", or just "v." in legal contexts, abbreviates.

Krugman's "tweet" spelled the word correctly⁴, so the incorrect spelling was introduced in the book and not caught by a spell-checker, whether human or automated. Since both spellings are legitimate English words, a spell-checking computer program that simply checks the words in a passage against an English lexicon will not catch the misspelling; but, because the two words belong to different grammatical categories, a program that parses the sentence may flag it.

I tried the sentence in a few free online spelling and grammar checkers, one of which did correct "verses" to "versus", but others found no errors. Turning from spelling and grammar checking programs to supposedly artificially intelligent ones, Grok spotted the error but, as was the case previously⁵, the answer it supplied was unnecessarily long though its advice was not technically wrong.

I don't think the confusion of "versus" and "verses" is common since none of my reference books mention it, but a short web search did turn up the following headline:

Roe v. Wade verses Corporate America⁶

So, it's not as uncommon as it should be.

Notes:

Matt Palumbo, Debunk This!: Shattering Liberal Lies (2019), p. 433
"Verse", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 5/2/2025
"Versus", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 5/2/2025
Paul Krugman, Tweet, Twitter, 10/11/2017
Pedaling Lies?, 4/5/2025
William Schmick, "Roe v. Wade verses Corporate America", Valencia County News-Bulletin, 5/26/2022

May 4th, 2025 (Permalink)

Crack the Combination IX^*

The combination of a lock is three digits long and each digit is unique, that is, each occurs only once in the combination. The following are some incorrect combinations.

7 3 1: One digit is correct but in the wrong position.
4 2 1: Two digits are correct but neither is in the right position.
9 0 2: One digit is correct but in the wrong position.
1 4 3: One digit is correct and in the right position.

Can you determine the correct combination from the above clues?

^*Previous "Crack the Combination" puzzles: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII.

May 2nd, 2025 (Permalink)

New Book: An Abundance of Caution

Quote: "School closures…don't only affect children. … Their closure en masse was the rarest of public policies, one that knocked society off its axis, and the decisions that set it in motion were made incredibly quickly―and without a notion of their impact or when things would return to normal. This book is an anatomy of that historic decision-making process and the many that would follow in its wake regarding schools during the coronavirus pandemic. … We see how incentives that were misaligned with the interests of the public often drove decisions. We see how authority figures' influence was channeled through the media and, in turn, how the media influenced the authorities and regular citizens. We also see how the nature of news, and the muddling effect of the media's penchant for anecdotes and the spectacular, obscured mundane and nuanced reality. Lastly, we witness how ideological tribalism and groupthink overrode long-established values…."¹

Title: An Abundance of Caution

Subtitle: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions

Comment: The subtitle and excerpt, above, indicate that the book is entirely, or at least primarily, devoted to the bad decisions during the pandemic that related to American schools. Since some of the worst decision-making at the time was that which affected children, this limitation may actually exaggerate how bad decisions were in general, though they were certainly bad enough.

Author: David Zweig

Comment: Zweig is one of the few mainstream journalists during the pandemic who didn't swallow the government's propaganda line, including hook and sinker, and I recommended two of his articles at the time². He was also one of the journalists given access to the Twitter files³.

Date: 2025

Summary: The book is divided into four parts and, since I haven't read it yet and Zweig doesn't explain the book's structure in the preface or introduction, I'm going to have to guess, based on the titles of the parts and their chapters, what they are about:

"Seductive Models": I don't think this part is about Heidi Klum and Kate Moss, but I could be wrong. Rather, I think it's about the computer models, such as that of Imperial College London (ICL), which influenced early decision-making about how to respond to the pandemic⁴. The second chapter is entitled "GIGO", which is an old computer science acronym for "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Applied to computer models, "GIGO" means that the predictions produced by a model will be only as good as the information they are based on⁵.
"The Illusion of the Precautionary Principle": It's difficult to say exactly what the Precautionary Principle (PP) is, which is partly due to it not being a single principle but a family of related ones⁶. However, the fundamental idea is that one should avoid acting unless the action to be taken is known to be harmless, or at least less harmful than not acting. As such, the PP is a generalization of such common sense principles as the ancient medical precept of "primum non nocere"⁷―"first do no harm"―and slogans such as "safety first", "better safe than sorry" and "look before you leap".
I'm unsure what Zweig has in mind in this part of the book, especially by the reference in the title to "the illusion" of the PP. If the PP had been consistently applied during the pandemic, many things that did happen would not have happened, such as the shutting down of schools. There was no evidence that shutting down schools for an extended period of time, such as a school year, would be harmless, or even less harmful than the tiny risk to children from the coronavirus. In addition, if the so-called lab leak hypothesis is correct, the PP surely should have ruled out the "gain-of-function" research that may have created the specific coronavirus that leaked from the lab, in which case there would have been no pandemic at all.
"Tribalism, Public Health, the Elite, and the Media": It seems clear what this part is about, namely, the way in which people during the pandemic were forced to join certain "tribes". One of these tribes is identified in the title of the first chapter in this part: "If Trump is for it, then we're against it". Of course, there was also an "if Trump is for it, then we're for it" tribe. Tribalism and "Groupthink"―the title of chapter 15―no doubt contributed to bad decision-making during the pandemic since certain policy positions became political. As a result, you could usually predict a person's position on pandemic policies based on which party they supported; that this is a bad way to make decisions about scientific and medical matters ought to be obvious.
"Progressive Dogma and Narrative Control": I'm even less sure what this part is about than part 2, though perhaps "narrative control" refers to the propaganda put out by the progressive media. Possibly it also denotes the efforts at censoring critics of the government's response to the pandemic undertaken by the Democrats after Biden's election gave them control of that response.

The Blurbs: The book is blurbed favorably by Marty Makary⁸, Nate Silver and Matt Taibbi.

Disclaimer: I haven't read this book yet, so can't review or recommend it, but its topic interests me and may also interest readers. The above remarks are based solely on a sample of the book.