Guests sipped signature cocktails and nibbled hors d'oeuvres into the wee
hours until the evening winded down and they went home with gift baskets teeming
with treats from local merchants.
The catch ....
I changed "winded" to "wound."
"Winded," 99% of the time, means out of breath. The proper past tense of the verb "to wind" is "wound." Webster's New World does allow "winded" as a past tense, but calls it "rare." And in copy editing, we never opt for secondary dictionary choices, much less "rare" ones.
That was almost the one that got away.
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4 comments:
Isn't "into the wee hours" and "evening" a strange contrast? Wee hours feels like after midnight, which doesn't count as evening for me.
Good catch. That weirdness happened in my rewrite. (I disguise passages so's I won't get into trouble with the people I'm workin' for. I got a little sloppy with this one.)
: )
Shouldn't their be a comma after the word (down)? It just doesn't seem to read right without one.
Cary Wilkins (Fullsail University)
Actually, yeah, that would be better. Comma rules say you don't need one between to independent clauses joined by a conjunction if those clauses are closely tied (and/or part of a single thought). So I could justify not having a comma there. But you're right that a comma would make it better!
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