Friday, August 10, 2007

Fore -- uh -- word

UPDATED AT 5:58 P.M.

The estimable Arnold Kling blogs at EconLog (with Bryan Caplan), which is a must-read for me. Today, Arnold stumbles a bit on spelling. He writes "foreward" where he means "foreword": "a short introductory essay preceding the text of a book."

"Foreward" might seem to be a conflation of "foreword" and "forward" (a relative direction). But, no, "foreward" is a word, if an archaic one, which is only tangentially related to "foreword" and "forward." It means "the van; the front," as in a battle. (It's a new one on me.)

Given the context, however, the word Arnold wants is "foreword."

UPDATE: Arnold has corrected his spelling error. I thank him for the acknowledgment, and for the opportunity to learn a new word ("foreward").