In British usage, assure applies to giving confidence to a person, ensure generally "to make certain" and insure specifically "to guard against financial risk."
In American English, ensure and insure have merged and are now interchangeable.
You know what? The Brits have a useful distinction; that [sic] should stick. Everybody back up on the ramparts.
ON LINCOLN
Shouldn't a rhetorical question end with a question mark?
In Abraham Lincoln's "Second Inaugural Address" ("with malice toward none"), the Civil War president posed this complex, provocative religious question: "If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?"
In the Collected Works, as well as in the manuscript in Lincoln's handwriting at the Library of Congress, the question mark appears.
But on the marble wall of the Lincoln Memorial, the sentence ends with a period.
George Van Cleve, a lawyer in Arlington, Virginia, has been petitioning the National Park Service to change it to the way Lincoln wrote it. He has been getting the bureaucratic runaround.
Other mistakes can't compare. Restore Lincoln's question mark.
RSS