Foreword

I stumble upon a vocabulary quiz in an online U.K. magazine. It consists of ten 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 ten right.

I scoff. I take the stupid test. I click on the submit button and smugly await confirmation of my excellence. 

"CONGRATULATIONS!" comes the reply. "YOU SCORED 9/10! THAT PUTS YOU IN THE 92ND PERCENTILE!"

Huh?!

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? 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 have I looked that all-caps word square in the face and read it?

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