Notes & Asides.(Wright Brothers' Centennial world air-speed record flight; English usage)

-- Dear Bill: We went around the world together on the Concorde 14 years ago, and I wanted you and your friends to know of my upcoming Wright Brothers' Centennial world air-speed record flight, "Around the World over Both the Earth's Poles," named "Spirit of Fort Lauderdale."

The 261 lucky passengers on my Northwest Airlines Boeing 747-400 flight will have flown over both the South and North Poles upon returning to Ft. Lauderdale! We'll leave at 12 noon on Monday, Dec. 15, 2003, flying to Rio Gallegos, Argentina, just 300 miles north of the southern tip of South America. Then we'll fly over the South Pole, plus 4,200 miles of Antarctica in daylight, to Perth, Australia; then on to Beijing, China; then over the North Pole to Ft. Lauderdale-which we left 51 hours previously!

We plan to beat the record over-both-Poles flight-set by Pan Am in 1977-by almost three hours, for the Guinness Book of Records. Our trip host will be Gen. Thomas P. Stafford, the Apollo 10 and Apollo Soyuz mission commander. Gen. Stafford (USAF Ret.) holds the all-time world air-speed record for circumnavigating the earth in a spacecraft: 24,791 mph.

NR readers should know that there are seats available on this great adventure. For full details, please see the website: www.over-both-poles.com., or phone 800-903-0879 (inside the USA) or 305-445-3632 (outside the USA). Tell everyone they'll kill themselves if they let this one go by.

Warmest, Don [Pevsner] Merritt Island, Fla.

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: As a 68-year-old teacher, finishing her 27th year of grammar instruction, I must agree with Ms. Hyzer of Reedsburg, Wis. (June 2): Sneak, sneaked, and had sneaked remain absolutely correct.

Even if one robs a thousand banks a month, it remains an "incorrect" method of ...