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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:

  1. ↑ Kitty Burns Florey, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences (2006), p. 116.
  2. ↑ "Wretch", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 4/1/2026.
  3. ↑ "Retch", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 4/1/2026.
  4. ↑ 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?
  5. ↑ Jack Turner, "Green Gold: The Return of Absinthe", The New Yorker, 3/6/2006. The misspelling is still uncorrectd.
  6. ↑ Private chat with GPT-5 mini, 3/29/2026.
Puzzle
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:

  1. ↑ Pp. xvi-xvii. Paragraphing suppressed. Citations to page numbers are to the New Book.
  2. ↑ P. 270.
  3. ↑ Pp. xv-xvi.
  4. ↑ 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.

  1. ↑ 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
  2. ↑ 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.
  3. ↑ Nayeem Islam, "The Fabrication Problem: How AI Models Generate Fake Citations, URLs, and References", Medium, 6/12/2025.
  4. ↑ 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.
  5. ↑ See: Victoria Stern, "The 'phantom reference:' How a made-up article got almost 400 citations", Retraction Watch, 11/14/2017.
March 5th, 2026 (Corrected: 3/6/2026) (Permalink)

An Unmitigated Mistake

There are two problems with the following headline:

Marine reserves help mitigate against climate change, say scientists1

When I first saw it, I wondered what the Marine Corps Reserve could possibly do about climate change. Then, I read the article beneath the headline and discovered that its first two words referred to ocean sanctuaries for sea life, not amphibious soldiers.

So, the first problem with the headline is that "marine reserves", especially with a capital "M", is ambiguous. Later in the article, we learn that such a reserve is referred to by the bureaucratic phrase "Marine Protected Area", or "MPA" for short. Thus, the ambiguity in the headline could have been avoided by rewording it: "Marine Protected Areas help mitigate against climate change, say scientists".

Can you see the second problem? "To mitigate" is a transitive verb meaning to lessen the severity of something―usually a problem or punishment2. It's most commonly found in legal contexts in such phrases as "mitigating circumstances", which should lessen the punishment for an offense. The negative form "unmitigated" occurs in such hackneyed phrases as "unmitigated disaster", meaning a disaster without mitigating circumstances. Since "mitigate" is a transitive verb, there's no need for a preposition such as "against" to connect it to its object. If the article's writer really meant "mitigate", the headline should have left out "against".

However, it's likely that the writer was confusing "mitigate" with the similar-looking "militate", a rare word most often found in the phrase "militate against". "To militate" is an intransitive verb meaning to act vigorously in a positive or negative way3, and it takes a preposition to indicate whether the act is for or against something. So, the headline could have been worded: "Marine reserves help militate against climate change, say scientists". The erroneous "against" appears to have been introduced in the press release for the study paper, whose title uses "mitigate" correctly: "Marine reserves can mitigate and promote adaptation to climate change"4.

The phrase "mitigate against" seems to be a common error since most of my reference books warn against it5. One exception is Lite English by Rudolf Flesch6, who calls it "a very interesting case", and I agree. Flesch's book is a sort of reversal of the reference books on common errors in English that I cited in the preceding note in that he defends some uses that those books condemn. It's a glossary of words and phrases that he says are "OK to use no matter what" those he refers to as "purists" say, and he claims that science is on his side7―how "science" could possibly take sides in this dispute he fails to explain.

After explaining what "mitigate" and "militate" mean, here's what he has to say about the phrase "mitigate against":

The trouble is that the American people constantly mix up the two words. They say and write mitigate against when they mean militate against and they simply don't use the word militate at all.8

After an example of the use of the phrase "mitigate against" from the New York Times Magazine, he continues:

Twenty years ago the mistake would have been caught by the copyreader and if not, by the printer's proofreader. No longer. The Times is now riddled with misprints and mistakes of all kinds. I looked up this common mixup or idiom in all the dictionaries. Not a single one of them mentions this extremely common usage. … On the other hand, this "common mistake" is mentioned in virtually every book on English usage.

Despite referring to the phrase as a "mixup" and a "mistake", Flesch finally surrenders:

I'm afraid it's a lost battle. We might as well accept the fact that mitigate against is now an American idiom.

I think the main reason that "mitigate" and "militate" continue to be confused is that both words are unfamiliar and people don't know what they mean. Anyone who understands what "mitigate" means would never say "mitigate against", which is ungrammatical: would anyone ever write "lessen against"?

Here's a fast and filthy tip for remembering the difference between "militate" and "mitigate": "militate" is cognate with "military" and "militant", all of which descend from the Latin verb "militare", meaning to serve as a soldier9. So, to militate is to fight for or against something like a soldier. For "mitigate", just remember that to use it in the phrase "mitigate against" would be an unmitigated error.

"Mitigate against" is an "interesting case" for "non-purists" such as Flesch: according to "purist" Bill Bryson, "[m]itigate against often appears and is always wrong"10. How is it possible, according to Flesch, for something to be both common and an error? How common does an error in language use have to be before it no longer counts as an error? Does it have to be the majority of its uses? If so, we need research such as surveys or searches of language corpora* into the commonness of uses such as "mitigate against" before we can even know whether it's an error.

Over forty years after Flesch raised the white flag, "mitigate against" is still widely recognized as a grammatical error, and all but one of the books I cited above was published after Flesch's11. So, the "purists" are still militating against the barbarian hordes.

Notes:

  1. ↑ "Marine reserves help mitigate against climate change, say scientists", University of York, 6/5/2017. I found this example in: Ross & Kathryn Petras, That Doesn't Mean What You Think it Means: The 150 Most Commonly Misused Words and Their Tangled Histories (2018), under: "Mitigate/militate".
  2. ↑ "Mitigate", The Britannica Dictionary, accessed: 3/5/2026.
  3. ↑ "Militate", The Britannica Dictionary, accessed: 3/5/2026.
  4. ↑ Callum M. Roberts, et al., "Marine reserves can mitigate and promote adaptation to climate change", PNAS 114 (24) 6167-6175, 6/5/2017.
  5. ↑ In addition to the Petras' book listed in note 1, above, they are:
    • Harry Blamires, The Cassell Guide to Common Errors in English (1997)
    • Bill Bryson, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer's Guide to Getting it Right (2002)
    • James Cochrane, Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English (2005)
    • Michael Dummett, Grammar & Style for Examination Candidates and Others (1993)
    • Harry Shaw, Dictionary of Problem Words and Expressions (1987)
  6. ↑ Rudolf Flesch, Lite English: Popular Words that are OK to Use (1983).
  7. ↑ Ibid., "Preface".
  8. ↑ Ibid., under "mitigate against". Subsequent quotes of Flesch are from this entry.
  9. ↑ William & Mary Morris, Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1962).
  10. ↑ Under "militate, mitigate": see full citation under note 5, above.
  11. ↑ See also: Merrill Perlman, "Mitigate and militate", Columbia Journalism Review, 5/1/2017.

*↑ I made the mistake of relying on my imperfect knowledge of Latin and originally wrote "corpi" here instead of the correct plural of "corpus", which is "corpora". See: "Corpus", The Britannica Dictionary, accessed: 3/6/2026.

Puzzle
March 3rd, 2026 (Permalink)

The Mystery of the Top Five

Every month, Victor Timm's Mystery Magazine conducts a survey of its readers to determine their most popular mystery writers. The list is ordered from one to five from favorite (1) to least liked (5). The same five writers, including Brand, made the list this month as last month, but each was in a different position. For instance, Christie rose in this month's rankings from last month. If you add together the digits of the positions from last month and this month, then the sum for Armstrong is seven, Christie's is eight, Doyle's is six, and Edwards' is five.

From the information above, can you determine the positions of the top five mystery writers for both months?

February 9th, 2026 (Permalink)

How to Lie With Notes 5: Death by Footnote1

The conspiracists work hard to give their written evidence the veneer of scholarship. The approach has been described as death by footnote2.

I take the title of this entry from the above passage from David Aaronovitch's book on conspiracy theories. Ironically and frustratingly, the second sentence is not noted, that is, there is no citation to a source, so there's no way to tell who described this "approach" as "death by footnote", which I would dearly like to know. Moreover, it's not as if the book has no notes―it has endnotes―so this is a ghost note of the second type, that is, a missing one3. Of course, Aaronovitch probably just couldn't remember where he heard or read the phrase, but he could have at least added a note explaining that.

In a magazine article published shortly before the book, and perhaps drawing on it, Aaronovitch wrote:

[Conspiracy theories] share certain features that make them work. These include…the use of apparently scholarly ways of laying out arguments (or "death by footnote")…. These characteristics help them to convince intelligent people of deeply unintelligent things.4

It's hard to tell from these two brief mentions what exactly Aaronovitch or his unnamed source meant by "death by footnote", though it's clear that it has something to do with conspiracy theorists (CTists) making a pretense to scholarship. There are many ways that pseudo-scholarship apes actual scholarship but, in this entry, I'll use the phrase "death by footnote" to refer to one particular practice, namely, loading up on notes. So, "death by footnote" is the opposite of ghost notes, that is, instead of too few notes there are too many.

Though Aaronovitch's topic in both the article and book is CTists, they're not the only guilty parties. For instance, the philosopher Roger Scruton describes a pseudo-philosophical book as follows: "Abundant footnotes, referring to out-of-the-way works in political theory, anthropology, biology, musicology, particle physics, etc., serve further to intimidate the reader, and the undergraduate, faced with the resulting text at the top of his reading list, is given no alternative but to parrot its terms….5"

While ghost notes and death by footnote seem mutually exclusive, they're not completely so. It's true that the first type of ghost notes―non-existent ones―are incompatible with excessive notes, since a work with no notes at all certainly can't have too many. However, the other type―missing notes, that is, notes that should be there but aren't―is compatible with an excess of notes. In fact, one way of concealing that a note is missing is to include so many other notes that it won't be noticed.

A good rule of thumb for scholarly works with notes is that the word count in the notes should never exceed that of the work itself. While such note bloat is not necessarily death by footnote, it's bad practice. If the notes are longer than the body of the work, then some of the material in the notes should either be incorporated into the text or made into a separate work. So, if you look at a page―assuming that you're looking at an old-fashioned paper book or journal article with footnotes―and more than half the page is taken up by notes, that's too many. However, death by footnote is not just a matter of having too many notes, but of using notes as a defense mechanism against criticism.

Notes:

  1. ↑ 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
  2. ↑ David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (2010), p. 13.
  3. ↑ See the previous entry in this series, that is, number IV, above.
  4. ↑ David Aaronovitch, "A Conspiracy-Theory Theory", The Wall Street Journal, 12/19/2009.
  5. ↑ Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015), p. 190. The book that Scruton is describing is: Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (3rd edition, 1996). Cited by Scruton, in footnote 50, p. 189. I haven't read it and, from Scruton's description, I don't want to.

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