Eats shoots and leaves

A TEXT-BOOK quality illustration from Prospect magazine of the difference that the absence of a comma can make. Here is Mike Prest, writing about Paul Wolfowitz:

By circumventing the normal personnel procedures to secure sweetheart deals for his girlfriend and cronies, he has exposed the institution to charges of hypocrisy, demoralised its staff and may even have diminished the bank’s effectiveness in reducing global poverty.

Presumably all would have been well if he had followed the “normal personnel procedures to secure sweetheart deals for his girlfriend and cronies”.

Hopeless Confucian

THE Times Literary Supplement enthuses over “Who’s Whose”, a guide to “easily confused words” published by A&C Black.

Some of the pairings, it says, “are likely to be confused only by orthographic half-wits”: such as aural/oral; cannon/canon; grisly/grizzly. (Count me among the half-wits).

The tougher ones will keep most of us awake at night. Distinguish, if you will, between complacent and complaisant; junction and juncture; luxuriant and luxurious; restive and restless; rebound and redound.