Onward, Upward, and 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, affect and effect, tortuous and torturous, horde and hoard, etc. The editors claim only 1.5 percent of the U.K. population get all 15 right.

Little do the editors know! Watch this working class hick from Westland, Mich., U.S.A. do his thing!

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 14/15! THE 92ND PERCENTILE!"

What?!

I scroll down to review my checked responses. 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 the late 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 first-page, front-and-centered, all-caps word square in the face and presumably read it?

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

Purveyor of Pep

It's a bitterly cold February morning. I'm on southbound Woodward Avenue in Detroit, just north of Seven Mile Road, when I spy a figure on the side of the road holding a sign and pointing at Westbound Seven Mile traffic. He turns his body 60 degrees--Woodward intersects Seven Mile at an angle--to face northbound Woodward traffic, and then turns again, 120 degrees, to face eastbound Seven Mile traffic. 

The guy's not panhandling. He's just standing and pointing at incoming traffic. He wants people to read his sign. 

I'm about a hundred feet away when he turns to face my direction. He's a young black gentleman. Smiling broadly, he's all bundled up--wool cap, scarf, parka, boots, and mittens--and now he's pointing at me. I read his sign: "I SEE GREATNESS IN YOU!"

Maybe he had a few screws loose. I don't know. This much I can tell you: he made my life a little more beautiful that day.