Would I Belie to You? The number of wordsmiths among the TidBITS readership revealed itself in response to last week's Macworld Expo article (see TidBITS-392). Nearly half the email I received focused not on the content of the show or the Apple-Microsoft announcement, but on my occasional tendency to belie down on the Jobs when it comes to grammar. I wrote, "Only the crowd's cheering and screaming belied the fact that Jobs is the computer world's equivalent of a rock star." The use of "belie" here actually means that the cheering showed Jobs's status as rock star to be wrong ("to show to be false"), which we all know would be( a )lie. The next time, I'll clean up my prose with a little sodium hydroxide (lye), or else stand accused as one who likes to Think Different (not "Think Differently," as also mistyped in the same article). [And, as we told Jeff, there are three types of lies in journalism: lies, damned lies, and belies. -Adam] [JC]

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