From Alert Reader Ray G in Colorado:
Hi Kim,
I know you’re a grammar nazi. Don’t know if you want any feedback on your own English usage. But anyway, it’s “to wit”, not “to whit”. You can look it up…
To say that I was confounded by this gentle rebuke is to make an understatement on the scale of “Kelly Brook has decent boobs”…
…because Ray is absolutely right: it is “to wit” and not “to whit”. And I have no idea why I’ve been doing it wrong all these years.
So what to do? Of course, I went back into my archives and corrected as many of those malfeasances as I could find (thank you, Winston Smith). And here’s the reference to the above understatement:
You may consider that penance for my mea maxima culpa.
And by the way: thank you, Ray — and anyone can correct me, at any time, if you think I’ve screwed up in similar fashion.