Welcome

Welcome to the WordWise web site, which originally became operational November 9, 2001; after having been down for a time, it has gone back online as of July 24, 2007.

Another editor might have said "up and running," but besides being hackneyed, tired, shopworn, and generally edentulous, that phrase is inherently redundant (can something be up but not running? Running but not up?), and we eschew redundancy. We fondly remember HAL, the errant computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey," who informed interested listeners that he "became operational" on January 12, 1992—a date that seemed impossibly far into the future when the movie came out in 1968. And in that year it is doubtful that anyone had heard the expression "up and running."

Our Name

Our domain name, verbalert.com, combines "verbal" with "alert": Hence, "paying attention to words"—which is the essence of being WordWise.

Purpose

Our purpose is to foster critical thinking about words. We regard words as mental exercise equipment. You can take anything you might read, from instructions on a frozen-food wrapper to the Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker, and find thought-provoking verbal constructions that allow you to stretch and flex and try your mental muscles. We hope to stimulate you with observations that depart from the ho-hum objections of the typical pundit—lack of agreement, misspellings, faulty parallelism, wrong words, and such—to prompt you into seeing new relationships in the English language and thinking analytically about what you read. (Of course, along the way we’ll cheerfully point out lack of agreement, misspelling, faulty parallelism, wrong words, and such.)

For example, consider the phrase "false sense of security"; you’ll sense there’s something wrong with this expression, if your verbal sensitivity is high—if you’re "verbalert." Or consider the daily abuse of the term suspect by journalists (print and broadcast): Although it properly means "someone thought to have committed a crime but who has not yet been convicted of same," one commonly finds formulations such as, "The suspect pointed a gun at her and demanded her purse." (Further comments on these two topics are available with a mouse-click: Suspect Terminology A Sense of Security

Plans

In the months to come, we will post articles from the original issues of WordWise as well as new observations on diverse subjects; we will also post examples of flawed writing that we find in sources from the Wall Street Journal to comic strips to food packaging. We will welcome your inquiries and comments and will be happy to (try to) answer questions you might have on spelling, grammar, syntax, punctuation, vocabulary, and perhaps even style.

Right now, this site is a little raw. As we learn the ropes of web-site construction, however, we’ll improve our technique. If you'd like to know more about the history of our late-80's newsletter WordWise, here is a link to a sort of apologia with respect thereto: What is WordWise?

Here's a special item for the pilot who happens along: That Well Known Chain

To offer comments or suggestions, e-mail wordwise@verbalert.com; postal mail may be sent to WordWise Publications, LLC, P.O. Box 23, Nahcotta, WA 98637. ––WW

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