Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Adapat* (for Adapt*)

One summer when my sister L. was a kid, she made a "fort" in the barn, where she discovered an old scrap of newspaper containing the mysterious word "ADEQUATE." She instantly realized that that was the perfect name for a fort. She pronounced it "Add-uh-KWAT," though, possibly because "Add-uh-KWIT" sounds a bit too much like your mom telling you to quit fooling around out there and come in the house for dinner. (It kind of reminds me of Templeton the barn rat searching for labels at the dump so that Charlotte could spell out her friend Wilbur's prodigiously porcine virtues in her web.) Adaquat* has proven inadequate for our purposes here, however, since adäquaten is the German spelling of adequate, and a perfectly adequate spelling it is. So instead of that, and in honor of L.'s architectural and linguistic adaptations all those many years ago, our typo for today is Adapat*, which agreeably turns up 60 times in OhioLINK, and on "too many records found for your search" in WorldCat.

(Barn bank, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

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