wrong singular / plural -- I mentioned "alumni", often used
in the singular. There's no such word as oxymorons. The plural is
oxymora.
literally / figuratively -- I've heard people say things like "he was moving so
fast he was literally on fire!" I suppose it just wouldn't sound right to say
"he was moving so fast he was figuratively on fire!" The word
"literally" is used as an intensifier. The use of a wrong word could be
made less blatant in this example by substituting "really" for
"literally" but even "really" is a wrong word in this context.
For some reason it's more acceptable as an intensifier, though.
e.g. / i.e. -- Foreign languages are tricky, especially dead ones, i.e. Latin.
AAARRGH!
infer / imply -- What are you trying to infer? (I don't know, but I'm not having
much luck so it's back to "Inference School" for me!)
laudable / laudatory are another pair of words on opposite sides of a
fence. A laudatory statement expresses praise for a laudable act.
finite / nonzero -- there is a small but finite percentage of the population that has
no clue about numbers.
less / fewer -- this one doesn't bug me much, but I know it bugs some people.
Once I was in a supermarket, and I saw a sign that read "10 items or fewer
". Amazing.
"That's old news," people often say, "it happened light-years
ago." Here's a news flash: light-years is a measure of distance,
not time!
I was just about to insist that nauseous can properly be used only to mean
"causing nausea" (as in nauseous fumes) and that it is wrong to use nauseous
to mean "affected with nausea" (as in these fumes are making me nauseous)
-- for that, I was about to say, you should use the word nauseated. To make
sure, I looked up nauseous. According to the dictionary,
I'm mistaken. It goes on to say current evidence shows these facts: nauseous is
most frequently used to mean physically affected with nausea, usually after a linking verb
such as feel or become; figurative use is quite a bit less frequent. Use of nauseous
in sense 1 (causing nausea) is much more often figurative than literal, and this use
appears to be losing ground to nauseating. Nauseated, while not rare, is less
common than nauseous in sense 2 (affected with nausea). Doesn't it make you
want to puke?
Using "which" (with a comma) vs. "that" (without a comma)
It seems to me just plain obvious that "which" describes the members of a class while "that" restricts the membership of a class.
Example:
The computers, which have DVD drives, need frequent rebooting.
--OR--
The computers that have DVD drives need frequent rebooting.
The first uses "which" to describe the computers. The second uses "that" to restrict the class under consideration to just those computers that have DVD players, implying that DVD players somehow contribute to the computers' instability.
Yet, can you believe I once had to explain this distinction to a lawyer who had drafted a contract for me to sign? I refused to sign it until he fixed the grammatical errors in it, which, in this case, substantially obscured the meaning of some clauses!
"Tow" the line -- the expression is "toe"
the line.
Hard-to-implement grammatical rules
There are some things you just can't say "correctly" without going to a lot
of trouble. For example, when Winston Churchill was criticized for ending a sentence
with a preposition he replied, "This grammatical rule is something up with
which I will not put!" Here are some more cases:
Jenna Glatzer, editor of www.absolutewrite.com
especially enjoys the following discussion of the word, "prevent":
"The brake is used to prevent the car from going through the red light."
Well everyone knows you don't prevent something from doing
something. You prevent something, period. So what do you prevent by using the
brake? You might be tempted to say the thing you prevent is "the car going
through the red light". But that makes it seem you're preventing the car while
the car happens to be going through the red light. To make it clear you're
preventing the going and not the car you could say you're preventing the
"car's going through the red light". By using the possessive you make
"going" the only possible thing to be prevented. However if you were to
say it instead of write it, it would sound like the brake prevents "cars going
through the red light", which is even worse. Oh well, the light's
green by now... Hit it!
Hopefully -- often people use the word to mean "the
speaker (or writer) hopes" as in "Hopefully, you will enjoy this page." Do you really expect the person to enjoy the page while filled with hope?!
Of
course not!
Inappropriate back-formations
Extra syllables: Our "Human Resources" representative spoke of a
"fictitional" employee whom she used as an example to illustrate the new Benefit
Plan. My guess is that this word was inappropriately back-formed from
fictitious.
"Allegator", used in jest by Harry Shearer on Le Show is a bogus
backformation from "allegation".
pleonasm: the use of more words than necessary, e.g. true facts.
wellerism: an expression of comparison comprising a usually well-known quotation followed by a facetious sequel,
named for Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick's good-natured servant in Charles Dickens' The Pickwick
Papers. He and his father were fond of following well-known sayings or phrases with humorous or punning conclusions.
For example, "'It all comes back to me now', said the Captain as he spat into the wind.",
and "'I see,' said the blind man."
spoonerism: a transposition of usually initial sounds of two or more words, named for William
Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), an English clergyman & educator.
Examples: tons of soil for sons of toil, blushing crow for crushing blow,
fart smeller for smart feller. One I particularly like is "one swell
foop" for one fell swoop, partly because although (or because) foop isn't a
word, it just sounds funny, and also because "fell" as an adjective,
meaning cruel or brutal, isn't often used outside of this expression.
catachresis: 1: use of the wrong word for the context (The paper printed a correction for the previous day's catachresis: dubbing a local artist-philanthropist a "socialist" when they meant "socialite."),
or 2: use of a forced and especially paradoxical figure of speech
Merriam-Webster says:
As you might have guessed, "catachresis" is a word favored by grammarians. It can be employed as a fancy label of disparagement for whatever uses the grammarian finds unacceptable. Thus could Henry Fowler, in the 1920s, call "mutual" in "our mutual friend" a catachresis. (Fowler preferred "common," but "mutual" does have an established sense which is correct in that context.) More often, "catachresis" is used for an unintentional misuse and is very close in meaning to "malapropism," which usually refers to an unintentionally humorous misuse of a word. "Catachresis" has been used to describe (or decry) misuses of words since at least 1550. The word comes to us by way of Latin from the Greek noun "katachrēsis," which means "misuse."
hysteron proteron: a figure of speech in which the
word that should come last is placed first. Examples: putting on your
"shoes and socks". "Lock and load", whereas a
bolt-action rifle must be loaded first, then locked.
synathroesmus: the use of a large number of
adjectives. For example, "He's a proud, haughty, consequential, turned-up-nosed peacock"
or better yet, this diatribe written by John Ruskin:
"Of all the bete, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on the human stage, that thing last night beat - as far as the story and acting went - and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsyturviest, tuneless, scrannelpipiest - tongs and boniest - doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest, as far as its sound went."
epenthesis: the insertion or development of a sound or letter in the body of a word.
This comes from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Example sentence:
Professor Seeles explained that epenthesis is the process of adding an extra sound or syllable to a word, as when a child adds a "b" to "family" and says "FAM-blee."
Did you know?
If you say "athlete" as "ath-a-lete," you've committed epenthesis. Some people consider the pronunciation to be unacceptable, but there's a perfectly good reason why it occurs; epenthesis is simply a natural way to break up an awkward cluster of consonants. It's easier for some people to say "athlete" as three syllables instead of two, just as it's easier for some to insert a "b" sound into "cummerbund," pronouncing that word as "cum-ber-bund." Epenthesis has even contributed to the evolution of recognized spelling variants, giving us such options as "cumberbund" and "sherbert" (for "sherbet"). The word "epenthesis" came to us by way of Late Latin from the Greek verb "epentithenai," which means "to insert a letter."
WRONG NUMBER OF NEGATIVES
Sometimes people throw in an extra negative -- "This ain't no disco" -- while
other times people leave out the negative when there should be one -- "I could care
less". Here are some more examples:
"Irregardless"
OVERLY "CORRECT" ENGLISH and MISUNDERSTOOD WORDS
Here are examples in which people trip all over themselves trying to be correct.
In the book about FrontPage98, I read that a certain activity should take
"five minutes or fewer".
That sort of idiocy would never come from "you or I".
People seem to think a guarantee is the same as a promise, or even stronger than a
promise -- "I not only promise this vacuum cleaner will work, I guarantee
it!" In fact this guarantee is not a promise that the vacuum cleaner will work,
but rather a promise that if it doesn't work that there will be some reparation.
As a practical matter, if 90% of the vacuum cleaners work, and the other 10% don't
work, the manufacturer can in good conscience offer a guarantee that the one you
buy will work knowing it will have to replace one in ten (or 1 in 9 if it
guarantees the replacements, too) as a cost of doing business.
But the manufacturer can't in good conscience promise that your vacuum
cleaner will work because it will have to break that promise many times.
OLD NAMES FOR MODERN THINGS
Why do we "dial" phones? There's no dial on a phone any more.
When touch-tone phones first came out I remember hearing TV commercials in which the
announcer would say "dial or punch this number..." Eventually the
copy-writers began to realize that people with the new-fangled phones still knew how to
dial a number!
Groups of TV stations that share some common programming are called a
"Network" because many years ago (before satellites) such stations would be
connected to one another by wires. Now the word is even used for signals that are
broadcast from a single satellite, such as the CNN, the Cable News "Network".
Everyone uses email, right? So you know you should "CC" people who will
get a copy of the email, but it's not "To" them. But did you know CC
stands for Carbon Copy? What is this Carbon, anyway?
Its atomic number is 6, atomic weight 12, it exists in living things, but what does
it have to do with copying people on emails? [Thanks, Fred Rexroad, for
writing me that CC now stands for "Courtesy Copy"]
When someone says something over and over and over and over we call it a "Broken
Record". Apparently, a record was some kind of ancient storage device, like a
CD, and breaking it caused it to repeat itself.
NON-PARALLEL SUFFIXES
Oh, I really didn't know what to call this category. See if you can
come up with a better name, and email me if you
can. The idea for this category started when I heard a story on the
radio about the Indonesian island of Bali and the "Balinese" who
live there. OK, I understand that the people who live in China are
"Chinese" -- you replace the -na with -nese. So shouldn't you
replace -li with -lise to make Balise? Or, as in Italy, replace the -ly
sound with
lians to make Balians? For that matter, why are Virginians Virginians,
but New Yorkians are called New Yorkers? (And, colloquially, people from
New Jersey are called "Jerseyites" and derisively, their neighbors
to the south are called Delawienies. But I think I've
digressed.)
Another example of non-parallel suffixes: Chocoholic. A person addicted
to alcohol is an -- you got it -- alcoholic. Start with the drug, add
"-ic", and you've got the addict. So a person addicted to
chocolate should be a chocolatic, which would be pronounced choc-o-LAT-ic,
don't you think? What was in the mind of the person who coined this
word? (And for that matter, what was in the minds of all the people who
mindlessly repeat it?) Did he think "chocolate" couldn't be
considered addictive, so he imagined a substance, "chocohol", the
essence of the evil in chocolate, perhaps, to which people become addicted?
Something pertaining to a "doctor", such as the thesis one writes
to become one, is called "doctoral". So you would think that
something pertaining to a "director" would be "directoral".
But you would be wrong -- the director's first movie is called his
"directorial" debut. No wonder school children (and many
adults who never learned any better) refer to a particular body of electors as
the "Electorial College".
We have "width" and "depth", so why not "heighth"?
GAFFES
"This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation.
It's what you do when you run for president. You gotta
preserve."—George W. Bush, Speaking during "Perseverance Month" at Fairgrounds
Elementary School in Nashua, N.H. As quoted in the Los Angeles Times,
Jan. 28, 2000
(Click for more George W. Bushisms)
Internet References
Urban Dictionary: soz
Related pages in this website
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