See? We do listen. By the end of this month (November, 2004) we will have finished converting The Basic Glossary of Grammar into PDF format. This will make it readable for people who do not have Windows, and will make it easier to print.

E-mail me at don@basic-glossaries.com if you want to be notified the moment it is ready. Otherwise, just keep visiting the website, where we will announce it as soon as it happens.

Earn your GlossaryPoints here! Yes, just for entering, you get one GlossaryPoint, and more if you do well. (At this level of subscriptions, everyone who enters will probably do well!)

First place = five GlossaryPoints.
Second place = four GlossaryPoints.
Third place = three GlossaryPoints.
Tenth place = two GlossaryPoints.
Entering but not placing = one GlossaryPoint.

GlossaryPoints expire after one year. GlossaryPoints are not transferable between
e-mail accounts belonging to different people.

CONTEST #2
How many words can you think of that have the letters x, b, and r in them, in that order? Here’s one to get you started: “exuberance.” No proper nouns or foreign language words allowed.

Entry deadline is November 30, 2004.

We have actually had quite a few suggestions for Basic Glossaries, so far:

• Real estate
• Life insurance
• Physics
• Human anatomy
• Computers
• Food

So, what subjects would you like to see a Basic Glossary about? Here’s one way to think of them: What subjects do you think you should be comfortable with, but are not completely?

Q: How do I know when to use “bring” and when to use “take”?

A: This is not as complicated as some people make it. Most of the time, use “take.”

The only time to use “bring” is when a person transports something from somewhere else to where you are or where you are imagining you will be:

“Please bring me that book.”

“I will bring cookies to your party.” (You are imagining you will be at the party when the cookies get there.)

“Meet me at the office and bring that report.” (You are imagining you will be at the office when the report arrives.)

The rule of thumb is “take” goes with “go” and “bring” goes with “come.”

Maybe this would have been more appropriate before the elections, but newspapers report polls and surveys year-round, so this phrase never goes out of date.

Margin of Error
When the story says Able leads Baker 62% to 38% with a “margin of error” of 4 percentage points, it does not mean that Able has somewhere between 66% (62+4) and 58% (62–4), while Baker has the rest. It means that 95% of the times this many people are polled, this will be true, but the other 5% of the time, it could be way off.

Pollsters try to “reduce” this margin of error by “qualifying” their sample: they try to make it as much like the whole group as possible. Unfortunately, “margin of error” is a mathematical term, and does not care how a pollster picks his sample. The math is based completely on how large the sample is compared to how large the whole group is.

What’s the point? There are two points:

• The quality of the pollster means more than the “margin of error.”
• Poll figures never lie — but they seldom tell the truth either.