Category Archives: English usage

Bare with me: more misused pears

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I was on live chat with a technician, and at one point he had to look something up. So he typed, “Bare with me.” Well! I’m pretty selective when it comes to either making that invitation or accepting it. Besides, it’s much more fun when we’re in the same room. Here’s another instance where a pear (oops, pair) of homonyms tripped someone up. He chose the wrong word. He meant, “Bear with me.” Bear as a verb has numerous meanings. Among others, it means to tolerate or endure. In this case, “put up with my absence for a while.” Bear also means to proceed in a particular direction, and that reminds me of a story I heard about two very dumb hunters. They wanted to shoot a bear, but they were afraid of getting lost in the woods. So they decided to walk along a road and just look into the woods for the bear. After a while, though, they came to a sign that said, “Lane closed ahead. Bear left.” What else could they do in that case? They just went back home. At least they weren’t watching for the bear with baited breath. If the bear took the … Continue reading →

How to loose your credibility

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Loose and lose are similar. They’re easy to misuse and easier to mistype. I like to refer to mixing them up as “misused pears.” Some people might wonder, “who cares?” The answer is that, if those who care include potential employers, clients, customers, or other people who can directly influence your livelihood, you’d better care. In other words, you lose credibility with careless word choices. “Lose” always points to a kind of failure: failure to keep or win. “Loose,” on the other hand, has a connotation of freedom. If your jeans are loose, you’re free to move comfortably. Or if you take a dog’s collar off, you let it run loose. So if careless word choices cause you to lose credibility, then I suppose careful writing will help you loose it. And you thought my title was a mistake! In this post, though, I’m not concerned with choosing the right word out of two or three homonyms. There are other easy ways to lose credibility. Here are two

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Evolution of words

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Our word “blue” comes from an old “Common Romance” word blavus. So? Blavus seems to come from the Latin flavus, which means yellow. Over the years, neither the spelling, nor the pronunciation, nor the meaning of words stays put. “Baroque” comes from a word that refers to a misshaped pearl. Music and art critics of the early and middle 18th century used it to refer to the style of earlier generations that they considered unnatural, overly ornate. In other words, these critics intended “baroque” as a derogatory term. It referred to music, architecture, paintings, etc. that violated “modern” notions of reason and good proportion. So what do we mean by “baroque” now? It’s simply a designation for the various arts of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. We like it just fine, even if we don’t necessarily agree about what it means, what it includes, and what it excludes. Changing parts of speech Sometimes words change meaning, or at least emphasis when they change form. That is, a noun might have maintained a particular meaning over centuries, but becomes something a little different as an adjective. Take “omen,” for example. In the dictionary, for example that word means a phenomenon … Continue reading →

Reigning in misused pears

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Some writers have trouble making the right choice between two similar words. I like it when I catch one choosing the wrong word. I can pass some fun with homonyms along to you. Someone riding a horse or driving a horse-drawn carriage reins in the horse to control its direction. Elizabeth II reigns in the United Kingdom. So what does the following come-on for a marketing instruction program mean? “How to help reign in your online audience and 
keep them from doing price comparisons when 
considering your product or service.” Is the marketer supposed to control the audience like so many horses? Or be its monarch? I suspect someone put in the extra letter because it looks more impressive, or something. Rein and reign are not simply a pear, um, pair of words that can be misused. It rains. It rains in places that have had more than enough rain and not in places that really need it. It rains. What is “it”? (Answer: an expletive.) Can’t “it” be persuaded to do its thing where it’s wanted and needed? But we can’t rein in the Lord who reigns on high and rains (or not) on the just and unjust, can we? … Continue reading →

Spelling, punctuation, and other fun topics

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People who like to read and write like words and like playing with words, sentences, punctuation, and anything else that comes along with reading and writing. Now that so many of us are BFF forever with our electronic gadgets, we have new tools for communicating—or failing to communicate, as the case may be. Word processing software now comes with spelling and grammar checkers. I expect most writers find them helpful, but they don’t make a very good crutch. For one thing, some of the grammar checkers contain hard-coded grammatical errors. And even if the suggested correction isn’t simply wrong, it might make hash of the meaning of the sentence. Spelling, or, software fails The spelling checker will bleed red all over people’s names, correctly spelled foreign words, brand names, and all kinds of things. On the other hand, just because a word is spelled correctly doesn’t mean that it’s the right word. I have had fun with that in my occasional series on “misused pears.” Years ago, a poem about spell checkers made the rounds of forwarded email. I just ran across a version of it again and love to share this kind of thing: I have a spelling checker, … Continue reading →