Misspellings That Drive Me Into A Rage

Last post of the year! I hope you’re not going anywhere tonight. I’d rather you not get sick and die.
 
All right, so the stupid thing I’ll be looking at this year is the errors I keep seeing that drive me nuts for no good reason. Obviously I don’t see any of you guys do them, but I do see them other places. Sometimes it’s teenagers making the mistake, but I’ve also seen people 40+ do these and I just. Don’t get it.
 
Que
Que, when it’s supposed to be cue (and no, they aren’t trying to say queue). I’ve seen people go “right on que” and it’s like really? You think that’s a Q? Why??? Now, I don’t see this terribly often, but the fact that it’s popped up more than once is just like what the hell. When have you ever seen “que” and it not be someone asking “What?” in Spanish?
 
Dissapoint
Ugh, this one grates against my nerves. Two S’s, one P. Really, I’m being a bit hypocritical here considering how often I spell words with the wrong number of letters, but come on. It’s dis-appoint not dis-sapoint. You know what an appointment is, right? Then you should know what a disappointment is! Because it’s spelling disappointment with two S’s.
 
Payed
I keep seeing this one and I don’t get it. Sure, pay is an irregular verb in that it’s spelled “paid”, and somehow payed really is a word—it’s a nautical term meaning to coat or cover with pitch. Frankly, I’m annoyed payed isn’t flagged as incorrect by spellcheckers. How many people are going to be using it for its actual definition? None! And I just keep seeing people saying they got payed on Friday. No you didn’t, damn it!
 
Loose
Now we’re veering into grammatically wrong instead of a misspelling, but I’m so sick of people writing loose when they mean lose. I want to go over to their houses and flick their ears every time they use it wrong. But we’re in a pandemic so I shouldn’t do that.
 
XXX$
This one might be just something that bothers me, but I can’t stand it when people put the dollar sign after the number instead of before. I don’t get why it drives me crazy. Technically, it’s supposed to be said “twenty dollars” so 20$ actually makes more sense. But I hate seeing it. Just looking at that dollar sign at the end of the number makes me want to gouge my eyes out. The chief perpetrator of this sin? My mother. I may have to block her from texting me until she gets it right.
 
There. You’ve seen my ridiculous pet peeves. What misspellings/misuses drive you crazy?

The Digraph

I think there is no pair of letters more confusing than g and h, though c and h are a close second. But why do we have this pair that can be pronounced “f” as in laugh, or isn’t pronounced at all like in bough or through. And if it’s at the beginning of the word like in ghoul, it’s just a plain g sound (apparently the h is there just because). Seriously, it’s like those two letters combine to cast a spell on pronunciation.

See, back in the old days, gh used to be what’s called a “voiceless velar fricative”. Or in normal terms, it’s a sound you make without the vocal cords (voiceless) with the back of your tongue on the roof of your mouth (velar) using the friction of a forced breath (fricative). The best way to think about it is pronouncing the Scottish word loch. Feel that hardness on the ch? That’s a voiceless velar fricative. However, over the years we softened it and moved from saying it in the back of our mouths to our teeth, making it into an f sound like in rough, laugh, or tough.

The silent pronunciation, where the letters just seem to be there to hang out, has little reasons if you look into etymologies. Though, for example, came from a word that was just “tho”. Similarly if you look at thoughtyou can see that in Old English it was spelled (basically) as “thoht”, with an h to give it breath. Same with fought, where you find that in Old English it was fohten. And if you remember my scare-themed etymology post, the word frightcomes from fryhto, a misspelling of fyrhtu.

That doesn’t explain much, does it? Unfortunately, this is as close to a reason as we get with the whole gh thing. The thing those words have in common is that in Old English, they were pronounced with that guttural, hard H sound. Modern English evolved after the printing press for the first time made grammar and style an issue. In order to get that hard H across, they paired it with G. We may not say it anymore but English is too old to change now. We’d just get confused.

PS. Since tomorrow is the end of the world, I suppose this is my last post ;). We had a good run. If only the Mayans thought to make their calendar longer! Or, you know, roll back to zero. What? That’s actually how it works? I have to think up a post for Saturday? Hm. I wonder why THAT wasn’t posted all over the news.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Dictionary.com

Tony Jebson’s page on The Origins of Old English

English Plus+

More Words That Are Easy To Confuse

Yep, here’s another one. Because it’s fun?

Sure, why not?

Discreet/Discrete

I am terrible with these words. They’re so similar, the only difference being two letters switched around. Discreet is subtle, close-mouthed. Discrete is separate, different, and also a branch of mathematics. When you want to be quiet, you’re discrete. When you want to be apart, you’re discrete.

Secret/secrete

For some reason, the word secret (as in confidential) always looks like it’s spelled wrong to me. I add an e and then when editing, realize my characters don’t exude ooze to each other. However, the most frustratingly confusing part is that there is another definition of secrete, which means to conceal or hide away (they secrete you away to an undisclosed location). That does not make them easier to tell apart! Lucky for us, secret is either a noun or an adjective, while secrete is a verb. You can remember which one to use by knowing which part of speech you need.

A while/awhile

This is what happens when a word is created by combining two words, and we still use the two separate words as a common phrase. Like the above, you can remember this by knowing parts of speech. “Awhile” is an adverb: “I have awhile to write”, where awhile describes the amount of time I can write for. “A while” is a noun. You would say “I have to go write for a while” or “In a while, I’m going to start editing”. A while is often used after a preposition, like for and in, so be sure to watch for that.

Past/passed

Passed is past tense of pass (Yes, I’m aware three forms of the same verb are in that clause, but bear with me) while past appears as an adjective, noun, adverb and preposition (basically, every form but verb). So pay attention to how you use it. Past tense verb is always passed. Everything else is past. That sounds like a deep saying, but it’s not.

Who/whom

In order to gain some understanding on the who versus whom debacle, I suggest reading the Grammar Girl’s several postson the subject. I know I can’t explain it as well as she can, and it took her three posts to get all the details. Basically, who is for subjects, whom is for objects.

Bonus tip for the last one: write first person YA like I do, that way you can blame any errors on an uninformed teenager.

Grammar Nerd

Ha!



On one hand, good grammar is important. On the other, I can think of a few teachers who were such sticklers that I can totally understand making them explode. For crying out loud, there isn’t anything wrong with using decimals, why do I have to have points off? Just take a freaking Valium, Fogbert* and pass me in this stupid class I need for my major!


Ahem. I don’t know where that came from.**






*Not his real name. Just what we called him.
**I’m totally lying.

Language of Confusion: Parts of Speech, part 2

Last week, I talked about the origins of some parts of speech and how they were probably created because with the printing press making books available to more people, grammar suddenly mattered. The meaning may have existed before 1440, but the name did not.

Preposition showed up in the late fourteenth century, from the classical Latin praepositionem. It is a combination of prae(pre-, as in before) and positionem (I’m pretty sure you can guess what that word means). Together, they make “put/place before. The grammatical sense was inspired by the Greeks, the first for using “put before” as the name for by, to, and all the rest. You have a lot to thank the ancient Greeks for, either by way of Latin or directly. In terms of naming grammatical terms, they came up with virtually everything.

Next we have interjection. It showed up in the early fifteenth century and also comes from classical Latin, in this case interiectionem. (I would guess you can thank Old French for throwing that j in there). It comes from the prefix inter- (between) and icere (to throw, also the origin word for jet...really). So it’s “to throw between”, which is appropriate for the sense of the word.

Conjunction comes from the same time period, and it comes from the classical Latin conjunctionem, past participle of conjugare. That is also the origin word for conjugaland it means “join together”. Com- means together. Jugal, from jugular, means throat or neck (and before you ask, yes) and is related to yoke or join. Conjugal often used in the sexual sense, even today. So the next time you’re looking at and, but or or, just think that those two phrases are doing it.

You can’t unthink that.

Sources

Google Translate

Garret Wilson’s blog post on Greek influence

Idea Finder’s post on the Printing Press

And as always, the Online Etymology Dictionary