Speaking of....

I love the English language - always have! - and I think it's fairly easy to use it correctly. One great piece of advice - similar to not trying a car with a manual transmission unless you've been taught to drive a stick - is not to use words unless you are sure of their meanings. I read everything I could find that Truman Capote and William G. Buckley wrote, not that I agreed on a single thing with the ultraconservative Buckley, but he and Capote were both masters of the word.

How many times have we seen a post about a certain sauce that really "compliments" the veal it's served upon? 

The letter writer who eulogized Natalie Wood as the "penultimate" lady in the Baltimore SUN after her death surely thought that he was singing her praises above the ultimate level.

He might have written that letter on very nice stationery he got as a gift, but he had to be careful not to call his paper and envelopes "stationary."

CNN's Laura Coates made the list recently when she covered the story of the unfortunate soul who committed an act of self-immolation outside a courthouse in Manhattan. If only she hadn't said, "We have a man who has set fire to himself, a man has emblazoned himself outside of the courthouse just now." To emblazon is to attach a design onto something. Nothing to do with setting anything ablaze.

Maybe that's what she was thinking of! And she was speaking live at a frenetic event, so I'll give her a pass this time.

But none for Lawrence Leamer, the writer who so thoroughly researched the relationships among Truman Capote and his "swans," the socialites who formed his support squad for so many years. He should have had a proofreader/editor dive thoroughly into his book "Capote's Women," in which he a) refers to someone's words as "mordent" (a musical term) when he meant "mordant," and b) said that Capote was a "vociferous" reader. With his meek voice, Capote would not have been vehement and loud while reading. Leamer meant voracious, and someone should have told him so....vociferously.