Notes & Asides

National Review, Sept 1, 2003

-- Dear Bill: We went around the world together on the Concorde 14 years ago, and I wanted you and your friends to know of my upcoming Wright Brothers' Centennial world air-speed record flight, "Around the World over Both the Earth's Poles," named "Spirit of Fort Lauderdale."

The 261 lucky passengers on my Northwest Airlines Boeing 747-400 flight will have flown over both the South and North Poles upon returning to Ft. Lauderdale! We'll leave at 12 noon on Monday, Dec. 15, 2003, flying to Rio Gallegos, Argentina, just 300 miles north of the southern tip of South America. Then we'll fly over the South Pole, plus 4,200 miles of Antarctica in daylight, to Perth, Australia; then on to Beijing, China; then over the North Pole to Ft. Lauderdale-which we left 51 hours previously!

We plan to beat the record over-both-Poles flight-set by Pan Am in 1977-by almost three hours, for the Guinness Book of Records. Our trip host will be Gen. Thomas P. Stafford, the Apollo 10 and Apollo Soyuz mission commander. Gen. Stafford (USAF Ret.) holds the all-time world air-speed record for circumnavigating the earth in a spacecraft: 24,791 mph.

NR readers should know that there are seats available on this great adventure. For full details, please see the website: www.over-both-poles.com., or phone 800-903-0879 (inside the USA) or 305-445-3632 (outside the USA). Tell everyone they'll kill themselves if they let this one go by.

Warmest, Don [Pevsner] Merritt Island, Fla.

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: As a 68-year-old teacher, finishing her 27th year of grammar instruction, I must agree with Ms. Hyzer of Reedsburg, Wis. (June 2): Sneak, sneaked, and had sneaked remain absolutely correct.

Even if one robs a thousand banks a month, it remains an "incorrect" method of "making a living."

Now, I realize robbing banks is criminal, but incorrect grammar is a close second.

Sincerely, Betijean Kinnerly Houston, Tex.

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: In the June 2 issue of NR, the word "Balkanization" was used.

Is this an ethnic slur or an example of geographism?

My forebears came from the Balkans, Slovenia to be exact, and the Balkans were not Balkanized after World War II by the residents; they were broken up by the western European powers. The western Europeans were not bright enough to realize that an attempt to cobble together someplace like Yugoslavia was a project doomed to fail.

Please have your editor delete "Balkanization" in the future.

Very truly yours, John G. Arch Pittsburgh, Pa.

--Dear Mr. Arch: We don't invent words; we use words that exist. Cordially, WFB

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: In conversation and prose, I have noticed an uncomfortable inability to differentiate between subjects in sentences, a recent example from NR (June 16) being: "In fact, Nixon created his bumbling 'Plumbers' unit inside the White House precisely because he feared that J. Edgar Hoover was too partisan a Democrat to be trusted to serve him as he (Hoover) had Johnson and Roosevelt."

The author uses the parenthetical to make sure we know to whom he is referring. Isn't there a better way in our wonderful language to make this reference more precise?

Sincerely, Anthony Pasquini Ft. Myers, Fla.

--Dear Mr. Pasquini: The parentheses here serve the purpose of hauling the evanescing subject back into play. They serve the purpose of the anacoluthon, bringing you back to where you were.

Cordially, -WFB