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May 6th, 2026 (Permalink)

The Almost Right Word

…[T]he difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter―'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."¹

Opening a book at random², I found the following sentence: "That summer, in the hot cities where poor families lived in cellars and drank infested water, the children became sick in large numbers.³"

"To infest" is a verb used of pests, such as insects or rats, that occupy a place in large numbers, and it's derived from a Latin verb meaning to attack or harass⁴. The example sentence tells us that many children were sickened, presumably from drinking the water. What was the water in those hot cities infested with? Piranhas, perhaps? Some type of insect?

"To infect" is also a verb but comes from a different Latin verb than "to infest", one meaning to dye or stain, but also to poison or corrupt⁵. "Infested" and "infected" are easily confused because they differ in spelling by only one letter, and a hurried line editor might easily mistake one for the other. Moreover, unlike many of the other word pairs we've examined in these entries, "infest" and "infect" have closely-related meanings, so it's no wonder they are easily confused.

My guess is that the illness mentioned in the example sentence was the result of some waterborne disease caused by a microscopic organism such as a virus, bacterium, or parasite, rather than the macroscopic forms of life that infest places. Such water is more accurately called "infected" than "infested", and a child who drinks such water becomes infected with the disease rather than infested.

As usual, I checked the example sentence in a few free online spelling or grammar checkers. As I expected, none found any mistakes since both words are verbs and the sentence is grammatically correct.

These words are so similar in grammar and meaning that it's not possible to say definitely that "infested" was the wrong word to use in the sentence; rather, it's Twain's almost right word, but the right word is "infected".

Notes:

↑ Mark Twain, The Art of Authorship: Literary Reminiscences, Methods of Work, and Advice to Young Beginners (1890), edited by George Bainton, pp. 87f. Emphasis in the original. I commented on this quote here: Struck by "Lightening", 1/1/2026
↑ Exactly why I opened it at random has no bearing on this entry, though it was an interesting happenstance that I found the sentence while looking for something else.
↑ Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (2015), p. 245.
↑ Luiz Jacintho da Silva, "The Etymology of Infection and Infestation", The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal 16(12):p 1188, December 1997.
↑ Ibid.

May 2nd, 2026 (Permalink)

Doing Violence to the Data

Batya Ungar-Sargon, "Debunking the Data That Claims to Show Most Political Violence Comes From the Right", 4/28/2026

The third assassination attempt on President Trump's life this weekend has reignited a debate between Left and Right about where political violence in America comes from. The Right points to the assassination attempts on the President, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the rise of Islamist terrorism, the rabid violence of the George Floyd riots, the elevation of political violence fan Hasan Piker to celebrity status in the Democratic Party, and the recent polling showing that the more liberal a person is, the more likely they are to support political violence.
On the Left, people point to January 6 as well as data purporting to show that most political violence comes from the Right. … The problem is, the "data" that these outlets have been relying on is deeply flawed.
One of the major sources is the Prosecution Project…which analyzes felony criminal cases involving political violence and sorts them by ideology. … Yet if you pull up the data center yourself, you can see immediately that it is deeply flawed.
The data set doesn't include either of the previous two assassination attempts on President Trump's life, as far as I can tell; a search for the time frame and the names of the would-be assassins turns up zero hits. Nor does it include the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The data set is based on prosecutions, which might explain the absence of [the first would-be assassin of Trump], who died at Butler. But what explains the absence of Trump's other would-be assassin…? It's pretty easy to say that the violence is coming overwhelmingly from the Right if you overwhelmingly edit out any political violence from the Left.

The Prosecution Project's (tPP) data is inherently skewed by being based solely on violence that's prosecuted. Ungar-Sargon mentions that the lack of inclusion of the first assassination attempt on President Trump may be explained by the lack of prosecution of the assassin, who was shot and killed at the scene, but there are other reasons why some political violence doesn't get prosecuted.

The editing goes deep. During the summer of 2020, the George Floyd riots were in full swing. Political violence claimed the lives of dozens of Americans and caused $2 billion in property damage. Yet the data set from the Prosecution Project lists …just three incidents of left-wing violence during that time. Maybe you think that people murdered during political riots shouldn't count as victims of political violence. …

Well, it depends. There are three problems with data for violence committed during those riots: first, it's difficult to identify, arrest, and prosecute perpetrators of violence during riots even if the effort is made; second, in some cases the effort was not made¹; finally, many of those who committed violence were simply criminals taking advantage of the chaos caused by the riots to commit crimes.

How is one to separate the politically-motivated violence from the opportunistic? One could, of course, simply categorize all acts of violence committed during such riots as political, but then acts of self-defense against rioters would be counted too.

In any case, the tPP's data is systematically biased because it's based on prosecutions and, at least, should not be the sole source of data for a study of politically-motivated violence.

I couldn't find a complete dataset for the CSIS [The Center for Strategic and International Studies] graphs², yet in their methodology, they note some glaring absences. For starters, the information it cites is culled from data provided by the ADL [Anti-Defamation League], which "uses public records such as media reports and police filings to reach their numbers," and the Southern Poverty Law Center―the same organization that was just indicted for actually manufacturing the racist violence it was "chronicling." Needless to say, if you are relying on the media, wildly skewed to favor the Left, for your data set, it's not data; it's propaganda.
Moreover, even when acknowledging that left-wing political violence is on the rise, CSIS admits it went out of its way to absolve the Left of even more violence. In a recent report, it excluded pro-Palestinian terrorism from the Left, reclassifying it as "ethnonationalist incidents rather than left-wing ones," despite the Palestinian cause becoming the most important litmus test for belonging on the Left these days. This is just a naked attempt to absolve the Left of a signature issue because that issue inspires violence and the people tallying up the crimes want the Left to win. …
This is far from an exhaustive list of the way the Left cooks the books when it comes to its tabulations of where political violence is coming from. … Suffice it to say, it's enough to make any honest broker truly suspicious of what they're seeing out there as "data."

As I've pointed out previously³, to count something you first have to define it. For instance, if you were going to take a census of all the bald men in Baltimore, you'd first have to define "bald"―and "Baltimore". So, if you had an incentive to minimize the number of bald men in Baltimore, you'd be tempted to define both "bald" and "Baltimore" in narrow ways. In addition, no matter how you define the two terms, there will be borderline cases that could reasonably be put into one bucket or the other. Given your incentive to minimize the number of bald men, you'll be tempted to put the borderline cases in the "not bald" bin.

Similarly, to count cases of political violence you have to define both "political" and "violence", and it's sometimes unclear whether a particular case was either politically-motivated or an act of violence, which leaves a lot of wiggle room for politically-motivated manipulation of the data.

Finally, even should one succeed in accurately counting cases of politically-motivated violence, separating them into "left" and "right" requires further definitions. As Ungar-Sargon explains, The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) classified anti-Israel political violence as "ethnonationalist incidents" rather than "left"⁴. This is fine but then it classifies the violence committed by Trump supporters during the Capitol riots as "right" despite being ethnonationalist⁵.

For these reasons, any attempts to count incidents of political violence so as to blame one side or to exonerate the other should be approached with great caution, and studies on politically-charged topics by "think tanks" should always be treated skeptically. There is a lot of advocacy research from organizations with carefully neutral names, such as "The Prosecution Project" and "The Center for Strategic and International Studies", that reveal nothing of their political biases. Such groups are often funded by wealthy foundations and others with political views and goals⁶. The money that such donors donate may not come with explicit strings attached, but it always comes with implicit ones: the think tanks know that if they displease their donors, the money will stop flowing.

Now, I'm not saying that such funding skewed the research done by CSIS or tPP; but I'm also not saying that it didn't. What I am saying is that there are good reasons to be skeptical of any studies put out by such organizations. After putting both thumbs on the scale, the CSIS report admits that left-wing political violence is both on the rise and exceeded that of right-wing violence last year⁷. So far, this year is continuing the trend.

Notes:

↑ For instance, according to The Grauniad, most of the charges against "protestors" during the riots were dropped, see: Tom Perkins, "Most charges against George Floyd protesters dropped, analysis shows", The Guardian, 4/17/2021.
↑ Red flag.
↑ For instance: "Charts & Graphs: The Case of the Missing Murders", 11/10/2022.
↑ Daniel Byman & Riley McCabe, "Appendix: What Is Excluded?", The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 9/25/2025.
↑ Byman & McCabe, "Methodology and Codebook", CSIS, 9/2025. See under "Riots".
↑ See: "Our Donors", CSIS, accessed: 4/30/2026.
↑ Byman & McCabe, "Left-Wing Terrorism Incidents Are on the Rise", CSIS, 9/25/2025.

Disclosure: I don't agree with everything in this article, but I think it's worth reading as a whole. In the above selected excerpts, I have sometimes suppressed the paragraphing and always removed the names of would-be assassins: I don't need to know their names, but they're in the original if you must know.

April 19th, 2026 (Permalink)

Dead Men Don't Review Books

Here's a puzzle for you: what's wrong with the following passage?

In The Making of the President 1964 (New York, 1965), Theodore White came to the conclusion that quotations had been utilized unfairly against the Republican candidate. … Harvard economist and former ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith sharply dissented from White's…view. … But Margaret L. Coit, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biography of John C. Calhoun, who had reviewed the White book elsewhere, wrote the Times to take sharp exception to Galbraith's point of view.¹

When I first read this, I did a double-take: didn't Calhoun die in the nineteenth century? How could he have reviewed a book not published until 1965? In fact, Calhoun died in 1850², so he had been dead for over a century before the book he was supposed to have reviewed was even published. Of course, I soon realized―as I'm sure you have, too―that the phrase "who had reviewed the White book elsewhere" was meant to refer back to Coit rather than to Calhoun.

The modifier following Calhoun's name is an adjective clause, that is, a clause that functions as an adjective³. In English, the usual way that we indicate the noun that an adjective clause modifies is to place the clause next to the noun. In prose, an adjective usually precedes the noun. For instance, the passage describes John Kenneth Galbraith as a "former ambassador", where "ambassador" is the noun and "former" is the adjective. In contrast, clauses that function as adjectives may either precede or follow the noun they modify. Moreover, unlike single adjectives, adjectival phrases are often set off from the noun and the rest of the sentence by commas or, less commonly, 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 modifier⁵. 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 novel²:
"…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 1932³, 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.

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 own⁴.

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, miserable²; whereas "retch" is a verb for vomiting or, alternatively, what is called "dry heaving", that is, trying to vomit but not succeeding³. 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 it⁴―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?

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 words⁴.

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 entries¹, 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 citation².

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 books³, 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 real⁴. 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 works⁵. 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:
1. Introduction, 10/23/2025
2. Latin Abbreviations, 11/15/2025
3. Anatomy of a Citation, 12/6/2025
4. Ghost Notes, 1/3/2026
5. Death by Footnote, 2/9/2026
↑ See: Striking a False Note, 7/16/2025. The current entry is partly based on this previous one; in fact, it was writing this earlier entry that got me thinking about the various types of misleading notes, and thus led to this series.
↑ Nayeem Islam, "The Fabrication Problem: How AI Models Generate Fake Citations, URLs, and References", Medium, 6/12/2025.
↑ Cf. J. Van der Geer, et al., "The art of writing a scientific article", The Journal of Science Communication (2000) 163 (2), pp. 51-59.
↑ See: Victoria Stern, "The 'phantom reference:' How a made-up article got almost 400 citations", Retraction Watch, 11/14/2017.