Walt's Annoying Word Usage Rants

[Walt Freitag]

After months of soul-searching(1), I've decided to post this at the risk of being seen as the Aunt Jo (an actual aunt of mine, who really does write letters to the editor pointing out grammatical errors) of the Forge. I'm posting in Publishing because the only issue that really counts is that people writing posts are also likely to be writing and publishing game texts, and therefore might care about avoiding these errors in their published work.

Readers are free to interpret the modifier "annoying" in the thread title as applying to whichever of the other words in the title seem appropriate.

I might add to this from time to time, and others are welcome to do so too, by my policy is not to name names or point fingers. To be included here, an error has to be spell-checker-resistant, and it has to have occurred more than once on actual Forge posts by posters who were not obviously typing in a hurry or totally unconcerned with spelling. And, um, everybody already knows about hoard/horde and affect/effect, so I don't have to include them, right?

So, here we go:

reign to rule, as a king
rein to control, check, or bring to a halt, from the use of reins to slow or stop a horse.
In the second half of the king's reign, he gave his ministers free rein in deciding economic matters.
This one's confusing because the meaning of "reign" is vaguely similar to the meaning of the expression "[to have or give] free rein." But "free rein" is the correct option. The expression originally referred to a horse, not a monarch.

cue a signal to act (or, a stick used in pool)
queue people waiting in a line, or any waiting list (or, a long bound lock of hair)
For the girls waiting in a queue outside the club, the arrival of Justin Timberlake was their cue to start screaming their heads off.

cannon a large gun
canon a law or rule, or a body of laws or rules
After speaking publically against church canon a few times too many, the heretic found himself facing the wrong end of a cannon.

a croc slang, short for a crocodile
a crock an earthenware pot, and thus, slang for nonsense or false information, short for "a crock of shit"
The zookeeper thought a croc would never bite in the morning, but that turned out to be a crock.

rout to defeat soundly
route a path or road
The property owners lobbied the city council to rout the mayor's plan to widen the route through the center of town.

tenet a principle
tenant an occupant
A very important tenet that most successful landlords abide by is never to accept a crystal meth addict as a tenant.

sheer pure or absolute; vertically steep (as a cliff); thin (as fabric)
shear sideways force, or a cutting tool using same; to cut with such a tool
When I tried to shear the sheep, the animal bolted in sheer terror and ran right off a sheer cliff.

coup a success; a blow landed; the taking over of a government
coupe a two-door automobile
The giant pothole delivered the coup de grace to my 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville.

- Walt

(1) Unfortunately, I still haven't found one.

[clehrich]

Walt,

Aunt Jo you may resemble, but as a writing teacher, I hereby stand in solidarity with all the Aunt Jo's of the world, and wish there were more.

And, um, everybody already knows about hoard/horde and affect/effect, so I don't have to include them, right?

Note the thread, "How has gaming effected your life?"  In this thread among others, we also see another peeve of my own, which I'd like to add to the list:

impact, n.  an impinging or striking esp of one body against another.
impact, vt. to fix firmly by or as if by packing or wedging.
impact, vi. to have an impact; to impinge or make contact esp. forcefully.  (Note that this cannot take an object: it's intransitive.)

Thus: "The GNS model's impact [n] was considerable."  "My bowels are impacted[vt]."  "The comet will impact [vi] soon."

But not: "The GNS model has impacted gaming considerably."  [Into what has gaming been packed, and how did the model shove it there?]

I know, I know, politicians and business people use it all the time these days.  But do you really want to be like them?

[Mike Holmes]

I've got to add a couple before we get moderated away (he said using commonly used incorrect grammar).

Oriented adj.. - infused with certain values.
Orientated adj. - facing Mecca.
The family oriented program showed a Muslim orientated for prayer.

Irregardless v. - to state a word regardless of the fact that it's not a word.

Perhaps we should do the affect/effect thing, as it does get battered here a lot.

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Moderate this? Are you kidding? I'm thinking of making it a sticky.

*********

To affect (v1) = to change something in some way

"I wonder how this potion will affect my constitution!"

To affect (v2) = to behave in a particular way (stated as the verb's object), specifically to adopt some mannerism for a specific purpose. Noun form = affectation.

She affected an English accent in order to impress the baby-sitter.

An effect (n) = a change in something

The effect on the baby-sitter was remarkable - the young woman ran screaming into the night.

To effect (v) = to bring about

Working together, we effected a change in world government.

***********

villain = a bad person, the antagonist in a story

villein = a person of low birth/breeding, not expected to be accountable for good behavior

"villian" is not a word.

***********

Best,
Ron

[clehrich]

Minor whinge:

Orientated adj. - facing Mecca.

Technically, facing East (orient vs. occident).  But usually used in this specific sense.

[Jason Lee]

nauseous:  causing nausea; sickening
nauseated: feeling nausea; sickened

ovular: being like or relating to a ovum/seed (for example, egg shaped)
oval: elliptical or egg shaped

(btw - affect/effect will probably always hurt my brain)

This post dedicated to Ec.

[Le Joueur]

Meaning no disrespect, but disrespect is not a verb.

Fang Langford

[clehrich]

Fang,

Not meaning to disrespect you, but:

disrespect, vt. (1614)  To have disrespect for.  (Webster's 9th).  See also the O.E.D. entry.

Admittedly, I hate it as a verb, and I wish people would stop using it, but last year I was about to mark it wrong on a paper, and I thought I'd better look up the correct definition, so as to seem pedantic but accurate.  Unfortunately, I found the above, which sent me to OED, and they accept it, too.  Sorry.

[Bob McNamee]

I was going to complain about "whinge", but my wife said "Just cause you Yanks dropped out the "g" doesn't mean its not the real word"

She always says I don't speak English! (she's from Yorkshire)

[Le Joueur]

disrespect, vt. (1614)  To have disrespect for.  (Webster's 9th).  See also the O.E.D. entry.

Admittedly, I hate it as a verb, and I wish people would stop using it, but last year I was about to mark it wrong on a paper, and I thought I'd better look up the correct definition, so as to seem pedantic but accurate.  Unfortunately, I found the above, which sent me to OED, and they accept it, too.  Sorry.

Ah, but that's a transitive verb as in "to disrespect," nothing grates more than "He disrespected me."

Fang Langford

[quozl]

The difference between lose and loose and how to use a semicolon:

I'm tight; you're loose.
I win; you lose.

Also, if anyone does want me to look over their material, just PM me.

[Scorpio]

Are you guys saying these people don't know thier own language? No, never!;)

[Walt Freitag]

D'oh! I can't believe I missed lose and loose. Thanks, quozl!

I request that to keep this thread as useful as possible, people refrain from generalizing the discussion to errors that don't actually appear or appear only once in the Forge forums. For example, no one's used "ovular" except on this thread. (The world of print and electronic text is large; the errors are many; and we are but few.) Ironically, Chris's (clehrich's) post in this thread in which he used "whinge" represents only the second instance of its use in the forums, making it eligible for Bob's subsequent comment. (My Webster's Unabridged confirms that "whinge" is a valid synonym for "whine.") But unless there's a second use of "retched" for "wretched" (not counting this post) it's not really worth commenting on.

By contrast, a search for "orientate" and "orientated" revealed a rich assortment of threads. I actually didn't know "orientate" and "orientated" were real words (if they're not real words, a spell checker will flag them so they're less of a problem for publishers), so thanks to Mike "Crocodile" Holmes for that one. :-)

Villian is not a word, but vaudevillian does appear in some dictionaries. Thanks for tackling affect/effect, Ron.

Finally, I guess it's time to give the "its / it's" question its proper treatment.

its belonging to it -- a possessive pronoun similar to "his" and "hers" which also lack apostrophes (even though the possessive forms of nouns usually do have apostrophes)
it's contraction for "it is"

- Walt

[Ron Edwards]

Walt's right - let's stick to the real villains of the piece and not simply seize upon personal pet peeves or bon mots that we're familiar with.

Note that the above sentence ends with a preposition. This construction has, I think, entered the language, or was already there, to such an extent that it's now often tolerable.

Let us not get into a split-infinitive debate! I can sense fingers already twitching in that direction. Just Say No (to the debate).

Best,
Ron

[Paganini]

Admittedly, I hate it (disrespect) as a verb, and I wish people would stop using it...

Aaaah! Nono! How can say this? There would be no more Kung Fu movies! "Yiaa! You disrespecting me Wok Fu! Prepare to eat stone fist!"

One that often bugs me is the difference between 'which' and 'that,' which is often confusing. ;)