I'm always attracted by those lists of frequently confused English words (there/their/they're), mentally testing myself and more often than not finding myself to be a genius -- if not a particularly modest one.
Yet I was reading the early pages of Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven the other afternoon when I came across the first of this similar sounding pair of words. It brought me up short: Exaltation? Shouldn't that be exultation?
Once I started thinking about it, however, I realized there was a distinction to be made, even if I didn't recognize it. After all the Biblical quotation (Isaiah 40:4, KJV) reads
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.
Mind you, I really know that citation through Handel's Messiah, but that's another story.
On the other hand, the lyrics to O Come All Ye Faithful (second verse) are
O Sing, choirs of angels, / Sing in exultation ...
With any luck I might remember this distinction for longer than it's taken me to write a blog post about it.
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