Have you ever played the dictionary game? It’s a great party game for a group of people with a reasonably good vocabulary. All it takes is pencils and paper for everyone and a dictionary. Designate one person as the chooser. The chooser finds an odd word and announces it. If anyone in the room knows what it means, it is disqualified. Once the chooser has announced a word no one knows, he or she spells it and gives the part of speech.
Continue reading →My occasional series Misused pears highlights other writers’ mistakes with homonyms. I hope you think they’re fun. A pastor who blogs griped that “It’s standard fair for megachurch pastors to be inaccessible.”
Continue reading →You have probably noticed an article or two about the annual banished words list. Did you notice that it came out on January 1? The public relations department of Lake Superior State University has issued the list since 1976. It’s a lot of fun for word lovers. New Year’s Day is a slow news day, so when the list was new, it seemed a good day to get some press. I thought it would be fun to look back at previous lists to see if our society has actually stopped using any of the words.
Continue reading →A wicked witch long ago cast a bad spell on the English language. Now there are hardly any common words that don’t rhyme with other words that have a very different spelling. Some people get confused. George Hearst, father of journalist William Randolph Hearst, ran for governor of California in 1882 despite having almost no education. In defense against the jeers of political rivals, he said, My opponents say that I haven’t the book learning that they possess. They say I can’t spell. They say I spell bird, b-u-r-d. If b-u-r-d doesn’t spell bird, what in the hell does it spell? “Burd,” by the way, used to mean “young woman” in Middle English (800 years ago). But how was Hearst to know? What would happen if all these rhyming words decided to trade endings? Would anyone be able to figure out what a sentence says? Can you? Try these.
Continue reading →That’s advice I saw somewhere about how not to fall for scams: “If you suspect the email could be legitimate, air on the side of caution anyway.” It’s an error of course, not an airor. The expression is err on the side of caution. Air and err are two homonyms that someone mixed up. Something I like to call misused pears. (Although actually the preferred pronunciation of “err” according to the American Heritage Dictionary is ur rather than air.) Lots of people err when typing, but not on the side of caution. I wouldn’t advocate being so cautious as to look up every word in a dictionary, but at least learn what the right word is and then proofread! But that mistake somehow reminds me of a sign I saw posted in a town where I used to live: “Do not air out your dog here.” I wish I had taken a picture of it. That sign isn’t a misused pear, just a very strange euphemism. Whoever posted it certainly didn’t care how much air came out of a dog!
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