5-13-05 Climatic vs. Climactic

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=90 BGCOLOR="#006699" TEXT="#080000" background="042d05a3.jpg"> <div> <FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" ><B>Big Ring Media Team, Inc.</B></FONT><B>    </B><B> |     </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Big Ring Media Team, Inc."><B>home</B></A></div> <bR> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" width=210 BGCOLOR="#FFCC66" TEXT="#080000" background="043d2123.jpg"> <div> Click on this link to return to <A HREF="id39.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Word Watch by Date">Word Watch by Date</A>.</div> <div> Click on this link to go to <A HREF="id40.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Word Watch by Subject">Word Watch by Subject</A>.</div> </td> <td valign="top" height=390 width="100%" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <I>5-13-05 Climatic vs. Climactic</I></div> <div> What a difference a letter makes. Consider “climatic” and “climactic.” The former deals with meteorology, the latter with a climax. These terms seems to cause lots of trouble for a broad range of writers. In a single day, we found “climatic” used where context clearly indicated “climactic” was intended, and where we found these errors were poles apart in terms of use.</div> <div> The first was in the notes section relating to Exodus 7:14-12:32 in the <I>HarperCollins Study Bible</I> (NRSV), (© 1993 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.):</div> <div> <I>The ten plagues appear to comprise different traditions; Pss 78; 105 count no more than eight of them. Here they are arranged in three sets of three plus a </I><I><B>climatic</B></I><I> tenth.</I></div> <div> The second was in an ad for some sort of [s6x] instruction booklet appearing on page 79 of <I>Rodale's Mountain Bike</I> magazine, June 2005:</div> <div> <I>[These] techniques have been used by men in Scandinavia for decades as a way to bring [wimmin] to [clymacks] and lock in their [orqazmick] muscle [spazmms] for a </I><I><B>climatic </B></I><I>experience that goes on and on.</I></div> <div> (You'll forgive our deliberate mutilation of the text. We don't want our site to pop up on the results page when someone goes Googling for this sort of thing. If there's value in spam, it's that the subject lines of all that trash has taught us how to trick the `net while leaving meaning intact.)</div> <div> This is another place where spell check is of little value, so it pays for the writer to be alert and pass along the text to a competent copy editor. We believe the problem is not so much one of outright error - the root word is clearly heard in these adjectival forms - as it is simple carelessness.</div> <div> Interestingly, we've not come across an example of “climactic” being used where context suggests that “climatic” was the right word. Not today, anyway. It's probably just a matter of numbers, where one theme is found far more often than the other.</div> </td> </tr></table></body>