Beyond the Rhetoric

The English language can be confusing for several reasons. You may find that many words have a similar meaning, but they are not all appropriate or accurate to use under all circumstances. To allude to something and to refer to something, for example, is not precisely the same thing. As I mentioned in an earlier [...]

When two words basically sound the same, it’s understandable that people can have some difficulty differentiating between the two. This results in a number of spelling mistakes, partly because the mistake won’t be picked up as an error in a standard computer spellcheck. One such pairing is “dual” and “duel,” which happen to be entirely [...]

These two words are just two different ways to say the same thing, right? Not exactly. In fact, saying that you are “uninterested” in a subject has a completely different meaning than saying you are “disinterested” in the subject. It’s easy to enough to see why these two words may seem like they are interchangeable. [...]

One letter can make all the difference. This becomes an even greater challenge when the two similarly-spelled words also have somewhat similar definitions. Do you know the difference between aid and aide? Just as advice and advise aren’t at all interchangeable, the same can be said about aid and aide. You’ll come across these terms [...]

Brevity. It’s something that is increasingly valued in a society with a rapidly shrinking attention span. If you can’t express what you want to say in 140 characters or less, I’m not that interested in what you have to say. And saving that one space seems to be worth some added ambiguity. The idea for [...]