[Sp5]

One mark of an educated person is knowing your homonyms and using the right word.

I can't help it, when I see mistakes in these words, I discount the writer's intelligence.

Using the right word in a phrase is an indication of education.

First, you start with knowing how to use its/it's, your/you're, who's/whose - the common ones.

There are a lot of other traps, for example:

discrete/discreet

peak/peek/pique

rain/rein/reign

tow/toe

principal / principle

roll / role

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

quiet / quite

creak / creek

[Patriarch]

council/counsel

[The Beast1]

Who / Whom


Even smart people gave up on that one.

[Parlay44]

Pussy / Poosy

There / their / they're

Your / you're

[Old Fritz]

It's a pet peeve of mind to see people write t "loose". As in, I am going to loose the bet.

loose/lose

[game_ethic]

advise/advice

[Mentavious]

Affect/effect

Than/then

[Rutting Elephant]

(09-13-2014 07:22 AM)Old Fritz Wrote:  

It's a pet peeve of mind to see people write t "loose". As in, I am going to loose the bet.

loose/lose

See internet, passim.

Before internet comment sections, I never would have suspected that apparently the majority of people make this mistake.

[Saga]

Compliment/complement

[Basil Ransom]

Faze / phase

Revel in / relish in (first is correct)

[Ensam]

Continuous/contiguous

[The Lizard of Oz]

(09-13-2014 07:08 AM)frenchie Wrote:  

Who / Whom


Even smart people gave up on that one.

I know one dude on the RVF (one of my all time favorite posters) who will revel in WHOM like nobody's business and will never let a WHOM faze him.

[Fortis]

I'm assuming this is mostly for people who speak english as a second language? I rarely see these errors.

[TigerMandingo]

further and farther, are they interchangeable?

[SpiderKing]

See this in the manosphere all the fucking time.

Dominant / Dominate

"Be more dominate"
"Spurs were dominate in 2013-2014"

[The Lizard of Oz]

(09-13-2014 03:31 PM)Cunnilinguist Wrote:  

further and farther, are they interchangeable?

No.

"Farther" is the comparative form of "far", so "farther" just means "more far than" just as "smaller" means "more small than".

Does this go far enough for you?

No, it needs go much farther than that.

"Further" is an adjective meaning "another" or "additional", or occasionally an expression meaning "also" or "additionally".

This adds a further complication, as if things weren't bad enough already.

Or,

Further. Another point that must be made is...

[LemonDrink]

To/too

[TigerMandingo]

Lizard, thanks for the clarification. I've heard both being used when talking about distance as in, "Main st. is further/farther up that way".

[DaveR]

(09-13-2014 06:29 AM)Sp5 Wrote:  

One mark of an educated person is knowing your homonyms and using the right word.

I can't help it, when I see mistakes in these words, I discount the writer's intelligence.

Using the right word in a phrase is an indication of education.

I very much agree, but with one large caveat: those born in the '80s and later may not have been taught English grammar, even if they otherwise received a good education. The reason is that during the '90s, educators in the English-speaking world came up with the moronic idea that children would simply "pick up" grammar by reading, writing and speaking the language. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that change was caused by Feminism; i.e., women taking leadership roles in education establishments and then working to reduce the technical aspects of the curriculum to make it easier for females.

I've found that young people who are fluent in complex European languages (German, Slavic languages, French, etc.) usually have a better understanding of English grammar, probably because they would have had to learn English grammar in order to understand and relate to other languages.

[Ensam]

Yeah, I was raised in the 80s and never taught proper grammar despite receiving what would otherwise be considered a stellar education. I learned it along the way but I still make a lot of mistakes when I'm writing quickly. That said there are some 'rules' in classically taught grammar that don't really hold up anymore (e.g. the split infinitive, never ending a sentence with a preposition, etc.). Garner's Modern American Usage is a great resource for learning how to properly use language for effective communication.

I will say that I will judge anybody who uses 'begs the question' when they really mean 'raises the question'. Begging the question is a form of logical fallacy.

[LeBeau]

(09-13-2014 07:08 AM)frenchie Wrote:  

Who / Whom


Even smart people gave up on that one.

Relevant and interesting article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/...re-english

Quote:

What Messrs Lupyan and Dale found through a statistical look at thousands of languages, John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, found in a detailed study of just five. In his 2007 book “Language Interrupted”, he asked why certain big, prestigious languages seem systematically simpler than their ancestors and cousins. English is simpler than German (and Old English); modern Persian is a breeze next to Old Persian and modern Pushtu; modern spoken Arabic dialects have lost much of the grammatical curlicues of classical Arabic; modern Mandarin is simpler than other modern Chinese languages; and Malay is simpler than related Austronesian languages. Mr McWhorter’s conclusion, in simple terms, is that when lots of adults learn a foreign language imperfectly, they do without unnecessary and tricky bits of grammar. (Most languages have enough built-in redundancy for grammars to be more complicated than they have to be.) Modern Mandarin is a perfect example of a language almost completely devoid of inflectional morphology, all those prefixes and suffixes. All languages have their complexities, but Mr McWhorter believes that Mandarin, English, Persian, Malay and Arabic dialects are all clearly simpler than they used to be.

What, then, can we predict English will lose if the process goes on? An easy choice seems to be “whom”. English was once heavily inflected; all nouns carried a suffix showing whether they were subjects, direct objects, indirect objects or played some other role in a sentence. Today, only the pronouns are inflected. And while any competent speaker can use I, me, my and mine correctly, even the most fluent can find whom (the object form of who) slippery. So whom might disappear completely, or perhaps only survive as a stylistic option in formal writing.

Another gilded-lily complication of English that foreign learners struggle with is the tense-aspect system, including three present-tense forms, I live, I am living and I do live, plus compound forms like I will have been living. These are tricky for speakers who don’t have them in their native languages. While these different tenses and aspects focus on different things, the differences are often not crucial. In the very long run, as English is spoken by more people who have learned it as a foreigner, some simplification of this system would not be surprising.

[Sherman]

Colombia/Columbia

[Sp5]

bridal / bridle

capital / capitol

[Princeton]

sight / site / cite

right / rite