Foreword

I stumble upon a vocabulary quiz in an online U.K. magazine. It consists of 15 commonly confused word pairs. You know, words like lie and lay, tortuous and torturous, horde and hoard, etc. The editors claim only 1.5 percent of the U.K. population get all 15 right.

I scoff. I'll show these Brit elitists what a working-class hick from Westland can do! I take the stupid test. I click on the submit button. I smugly await confirmation of my excellence. 

"CONGRATULATIONS!" comes the reply. "YOU SCORED 14/15! THE 92ND PERCENTILE!"

What?!

I scroll down my checked answers. Sure enough, a red "X" mars the sea of green check marks. It glares at me from the left margin next to the passage Don't just delve into the book. Make sure you read the Forward/ Foreword.

Wait. The word is forward, isn't it? That's what you read before you proceed, i.e., move forward in the book. Right? Right?!? I swivel round my chair and pluck Thomas J. DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln off the bookshelf behind me. Sure enough, right there on page ix looms Prof. Walter Williams' . . . Foreword.

How many books have I read over the years? How many forewords to those books? How many times did I look that all-caps, front-and-centered word square in the face and presume to read it?

Still I processed foreword "forward"?! The self-loathing runs thick on this one.

Jehovah's Witnesses - "Shunning"

People, individually and severally, have a right to associate with, or disassociate from, any person or persons of their choosing, for whatever reason. Kingdom Hall is a collection of people. Ergo, it is free to exercise that right. 

I am not partial to the flaky, unitarian theology of the JWs. Nor am I partial to the tactics employed to maintain JW orthodoxy. The fact remains no Hall official put a gun to the Stuarts' heads. They could have adhered to Hall doctrine and maintained the personal ties they had forged over the years. 

They chose to leave and put those ties in jeopardy. There are pluses and minuses to membership in any community. No "shunning" can explain, let alone justify, this horrific tragedy.