Learning About The Human Eye Via A Grammar Textbook

Recently, while browsing through an old English grammar textbook, published in 1958, and designed for ninth-grade students, I learned something very interesting about the human eye--that we actually see the world upside down.

In a ten-sentence sample essay about how the eye sees objects, sentence seven begins, "Do you know that pictures of things around you enter the eye upside down?" The next sentence explains that "Your brain reverses the images for you." I never knew that.

To verify the accuracy of that bit of information, I asked my ophthalmologist about this and he confirmed it. So it is possible to learn something about biology even from an old grammar textbook. And what I learned underscores how amazing an organ the brain is.

When Povertunity Knocks

The New York Times Magazine has a weekly feature called  "That Should Be a Word." Many of the words will never catch on but one I like very much is "povertunity" (see "The One-Page Magazine" column, May 13, 2012). I don't like the definition that was given: "A job that comes with no salary but has the promise of advancement." A better definition: a job that provides a salary and training for the hard-core unemployed, e.g. welfare recipients.

A "Turn of the Century" Problem

Here's a problem for William Safire or Richard Lederer or some other language-usage maven to solve--the proper use of the term "turn of the century." It either means the end of a century or the beginning of one. The writers quoted below clearly don't agree on its meaning:

"At the turn of the last century[that is, at its end], the dot-com collapse made e-commerce a dirty word among investors as headlines proclaimed the death of online business...."--Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth (Knopf, 2006).

"At the turn of the twentieth century [that is, at its beginning], Long Beach [on Long Island in New York State] boasted the largest hotel in the world, a 1,100-foot long behemoth that promptly burned down."--Edward Kosner, It's News to Me (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006).

"When [Hubert Harrison, the Afro-Caribbean orator and thinker] moved to New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, [he] brought a multicultural Crucian* background, reading and writing skills, intellectual curiosity, and a feeling of oneness with the downtrodden--all of which would be important in his future work."-- Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (Columbia University Press, 2009)

Which usage is correct?

*Harrison was born on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands.