Taking It Easy

In this week’s post, Ms. Picky had intended to discuss the use of certain introductory adverbs, but, since she is in a warm place, she decided instead to take it easy and choose some topics that are a little less complicated—one, a reference to the photo above; the other, two sets of words that are often similarly confused, sometimes through spelling, and sometimes through careless pronunciation. Finally, she discusses an error in this morning’s Wall Street Journal that she discovered just before this blog’s weekly “post time” and felt was simply too egregious to leave till next week. 

Re the photo above, it is interesting to note that there are two different meanings for the word “hammock.” A hammock, of course, is a kind of hanging bed, but a hammock is also a localized, mature hardwood forest in the Florida Everglades that occurs in the presence of two very specific circumstances: when the limestone bedrock has emerged above the water level of the everglades, and when the resulting forest escapes fire for a long-enough period of time for hardwoods, like mahogany, to become established and form a junglelike “island.” The entire small island is then also sometimes referred to as a “hammock.” And, now, on to the business of the day. . . .

ELICIT AND ILLICIT

Elicit is a verb, and it means to draw out something hidden or unknown, or to provoke a reaction.

Example

He had only a general idea of what happened, and he was trying to elicit more details from her.

(He was trying to pull the story out of her, bit by bit.)

Illicit is an adjective, meaning illegal, unlawful, or illegitimate.

Example

She vaguely remembered that he had been involved in some illicit business dealings, but she couldn’t quite remember whether it was drugs or gambling.

(She knew he had been involved in something crooked.)

ELUSIVE AND ILLUSIVE 

Elusive means hard to pin down, hard to define, or hard to remember (something that eludes our metaphorical grasp).

Example

When Allistair had asked her out to dinner, she had not refused outright, but had simply been elusive.

(Perhaps she said, “I’m not sure if I'll have a migraine then,” or “I might have to work that night,” or “I don't eat out much, because I’m allergic to a lot of foods. . . .” One hopes that, elusive as she might have been, poor Allistair finally got the idea.)

Illusive is an adjective and means misleading, imagined, or illusory (something that is only an illusion).

Example

After the market crashed, she realized all her “profits” had been only illusive.

(All her “profits” had been only paper profits, because she had not cashed out.)

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BULLETIN BOARD

For B.R.: Sorry, there is no “variant” spelling of adrenalin; there is, however, a pair of homophones with two different spellings and two different meanings.

Adrenalin (upper-cased) is the trademarked name for the generic drug epinephrine.

Adrenaline (lower-cased when not beginning a sentence) is a hormone secreted by the adrenal gland.

When one says one can “feel the adrenaline pumping,” the reference is to the natural hormone, not the prescription drug.

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WALL STREET JOURNALISTIC FAUX PAS

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal story “Apple Investors Await Cost of Japan Disaster,” Yukari Iwatani Kane says,

“The tight-lipped company hasn't said anything about the potential impact on its supply chain. “Investors hope to gleam [sic] some insight Wednesday when Apple reports fiscal second-quarter results for the period ending March 26.”

For shame, Wall Street Journal! “Gleam,” of course, is the intransitive verb meaning “shine.” What Mr. Kane obviously meant is “glean.”

“To glean” means to gather grain left behind by reapers, an activity practiced in farming areas, whereby, after the reapers have taken all the crops they’re going to harvest, the farmer allows the poor to come to his fields and gather whatever is left. The word has come to be used metaphorically to mean “to collect information, one piece at a time,” in the same way one would gather by hand the crops that have been left in the field.

This blog is now read in Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, France, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Malaysia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, the U.K., the U.S., and Vietnam, but not in the hammocks of the Florida Everglades.