By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JULY 16, 2024 | In 112 days from today, our country will host another election. While the presidential race is the key element this year, there are plenty of other offices to be filled locally in 2024.
On the Gwinnett ballot, there are 71 offices that local citizens are vying for. Only 13 of these offices have only one nominee for the seat, ensuring those candidates of election.
Worry not: You don’t have to be politically astute about all 71 offices. After all, you only vote for one (not four) of the Gwinnett Congressional delegates; and one each senator and state house representatives (there are 31 altogether).
That still leaves you seven county offices to choose between, for sheriff, tax commissioner and three commissioners. The district attorney and clerk of Superior Court have no opponents.
So there remain 58 offices to be decided locally in November. Who are these candidates? Kelly Lindsay of the Gwinnett County Elections office sent us a list of those remaining after the primary who are seeking election.
- To review this entire list of local candidates, click here.
Former presidents and their families automatically get Secret Service protection. But how about former governors, at least in Georgia? While serving as governor, the elected officials are driven around by Georgia State troopers. Even when retired, they remain celebrities, such as Roy Barnes and Nathan Deal.
Should we consider giving all former governors State Trooper protection in their lifetime? It would reward them for giving years of their time in service to our state, and be a relatively small impact on the Georgia budget. Don’t they deserve it? Surely, we can afford it!
July 1 was the birthday of William Strunk Jr., a name familiar to many who have tried the writing business. Here’s why. Strunk was born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1869). He taught English at Cornell for 46 years, but before that, he taught math at the Rose Polytechnic Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana.
One of his students at Cornell was a young man named Elwyn Brooks White, more familiar to readers as E.B. White, the essayist and author of beloved children’s books like Charlotte’s Web (1952). While working as an editor at The New Yorker in 1957, White dusted off Strunk’s little book — which he described as a “forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English” — and wrote a feature story about it. He revised the style guide, expanded it, and updated it.
MacMillan and Company published the book to wider audiences in 1959; White’s contribution to The Elements of Style was so extensive that he is considered a co-author, and the book is commonly known simply as “Strunk and White.” In 2011, Time named it one of the best and most influential books written in English since 1923.
The Elements of Style is a vital book if you want to improve your writing.
Have you heard these colorful terms? That of people “getting sideways with one another?”
Contrast that with another: “standing up vertical for me !”
Those two are quite visual directional comparisons.
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