17 February 2006
I received more email comments about last week’s issues than any other. Most focused on two typos: I misspelled Velcro and who. While I am an excellent proofreader of other people’s writing, like most writers I am abysmal at proofing my own words.
One writer objected to my classification of the words as from the 20th century, stating that the 20th century ran from 1901-2000, not 1900-1999. While this hairsplitting may be technically correct, common usage has the century (and millennium) ending on 31 December 1999. But the real reason for my choice of 1900-1999 as the dates is that the OED has no words with a first citation from 2000, so rather than leaving a blank in the slot for that year I shifted the set one year back.
