The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style : A ...

fortuitous 139
bitration in 1899 and a proposal in 1907
to supplement it with a Court of Arbitral
Justice:
The CAJ was . . . designed to . . . coexist
with the PCA. . . . The implication
was clear that states would quickly
grow to prefer adjudication over arbitration
since the former institution
supposedly more nearly coincided
with their vital national security interests.
. . .
Inasmuch as the 1907 event came later,
the Court of Arbitral Justice should have
been repeated by name, or initials, instead
of described as “the former institution.”
Another temporal problem is illustrated
by a sentence from a news item.
The statement cannot be true:
Haynsworth was nominated for
the U.S. Supreme Court by former
President Nixon on Aug. 18, 1969,
but the Senate later rejected the nomination
on a 55-to-45 vote.
No one can be nominated to the
Supreme Court by a “former” president.
It would be enough to say, “Haynsworth
was nominated . . . by President
Nixon. . . .” Anyone who read the story
(years after the famous resignation)
would almost certainly have known that
Nixon was no longer president. If in
doubt, the writer could have made it perfectly
clear by writing, “Haynsworth
was nominated . . . by then President
Nixon. . . .”
See also Anachronism, 3; ERST-
WHILE; LATTER.
FORMIDABLE. Formidable (adjective)
originates in the Latin formido,
meaning fear. Dictionaries in the past
generally stuck to the ideas of (1) arousing
fear or dread of any encounter; (2)
being alarming or forbidding in appearance,
difficulty, strength, etc. They essentially
agreed also on the pronunciation:
FOR-mid-a-bull.
In recent decades some users have
stretched the word nearly to meaninglessness,
without a trace of its original element
of apprehension. It has been used
in place of big and impressive. One dictionary
even gives “admirable” as a
meaning.
While a television documentary pictured
Jidda, Saudi Arabia, a narrator
commented, “It’s the formidable face of
a booming economy.” Impressive?
Handsome? Whatever he meant, aside
from empty alliteration, omitting
“formidable” would not have hurt. He
pronounced it for-MID-a-bull, a nonstandard
pronunciation heard at other
times from a U.S. senator and three
broadcasters.
FORSAKE. The Los Angeles Police
Department “forsaked its officers,” a
lawyer said on television, using a nonword.
Forsook is the proper past tense of
the verb (transitive) forsake.
In the context above, forsake means
to abandon or desert (someone or something).
It can mean also to renounce or
give up (something). Its other forms:
“She has forsaken me” (past participle),
“They are forsaking us” (present participle),
and “He forsakes you” (present
tense, third person, singular).
“FOR THE SIMPLE REASON
THAT.” See REASON, 3.
FORTUITOUS. Fortuitous (adjective)
means coming about by accident or
by chance or without plan.
A newspaper article told about a hospital’s
new, state-supported program to
provide schooling for juvenile patients.
The head of the pediatrics department
was quoted.
“This program was fortuitous because
just in the last 30 days we got
new hospital accreditation guidelines