Make Your Editor Cry: Hale vs. Hail
If you’re hale, you’re strong and in good health. Think “hale and hearty,” the well-known phrase to describe someone who can lift a piano or work ten hours in a field without blinking an eye. In Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death Prince Prospero invites 1,000 of his “hale and light-hearted” besties to his castle to cheat death. These days the word hale often describes healthy older people, but anyone healthy can be hale regardless of age.
Another far less common definition for the word hale is to drag, force slowly, or compel to go.
Example:
The deputy haled the accused into the courtroom.
As a noun, hail has the “i” for “ice,” and it is most commonly used when chunks of ice fall from the sky. But it’s also a verb as in to hail someone so as to greet them or say good things about them. You can raise your arm and hail a cab, hail the queen if you are a subject in that land, or hail a great success. Hail can also mean to call attention to something. Or it can be a way to tell people of your homeland or place of origin.
Example:
I hail from Tuscaloosa.
Gregg Bridgeman is the Editor-in-Chief at Olivia Kimbrell Press. He is husband to best-selling Christian author Hallee Bridgeman and parent to three. He continues to proudly serve in the US Armed Forces and has done so in either an active or reserve capacity for more than twenty years as an airborne and air assault qualified paratrooper, earning a Bronze Star for his service. Most importantly, he was ordained in October of 2001 after surrendering his life to Christ decades earlier.
