The Inigo Montoya Guide to
27 Commonly Misused Words

I occasionally struggle with affect vs. effect.

Who and whom are so tough because many writers – myself included – develop an ear for language and when in doubt we say a sentence aloud to sort out issues. Whom just sounds wrong when it’s right.

And if you don’t believe Brian’s assertion that The Princess Bride is genius, you’ve got more learning to do.

OK.. there is a smarter/wrong for hopefully.. but what is the actual rule? I am so bad about adding “s” to afterward. Great article. Too many people ignore the PUGS when blogging.

The one that always gets to me is when people use the noun “enormity” to mean “big-ness” generally, when in fact it implies (or does it infer?!) that a negative moral judgement is being made about the scale of something, e.g. “the enormity of the crime has shocked the authorities”.

I should get out more.

Towards and Afterwards have been deceiving me! At least I’ve only been unsure for 25 years. And most of that, especially the teen years, is completely blacked out.

Stop that rhyming. I mean it!

…and the next line?

Excellent post. I wish you’d included the ones that I see most frequently. Talk about lost causes…
There, their and they’re.
Your and you’re.
Than and then. Yes, I know two people on Twitter that misuse these in the opposite way. One uses ‘then’ when he means ‘than’, and the other uses ‘than’ when she means ‘then’.
Affect and effect. I wonder how many people actually know there’s a word ‘affect’.
Plurals with apostrophes. You’ve seen these all over I’m sure. There’s even a blog called Apostrophe Catastrophes.
It’s for its.

One more for your list:

Effect vs Affect

I know I always mix those two up.

My big pet peeve is “ensure/insure,” mainly because I’ve had a number of clients who keep marking it on review because they’re apparently convinced that “ensure” is only appropriately used when referring to a nutritional supplement drink for the elderly.

And who wouldn’t like The Princess Bride? It’s full of sports! Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…

“Tony has fewer subscribers since he stopped blogging.”

Nice. That’s one way to get me to comment .

thanks for the wonderful contribution. I once told a reporter they misused “historical” and was given a blank stare. They said called an event “historical”. Well, every event will be “historical” but they meant to say the event was “historic”.

I have, though, misused many of these words.

Good list.
Another one that bugs me: “myself” for I or me. As in “Brian and myself are going out” or “He gave it to Brian and myself.” Arrgggh!

Jean, that reminds me. He and I, me and him. She and I, me and her. Get it straight, people! How many times have you heard “Him and I”? Arrrggh. So easy to get right if you just remove one of the words. Would you say “Him went to the store.” or “They told I?”.

This post is really useful for me. I will remember these things as i am not English native. First time i am posting although i am your regular reader in email alert.

What Joe Cascio said – their, they’re and there. I see that one so frequently. Also affect and effect, which brings up my slightly tangential pet peeve – using impacted instead of affected.

And always, always much love to Princess Bride. Another good quote that is perhaps apropos to this article: “I would not say such things if I were you!”

What a great start to the week–i may laminate this. Hopefully, it will be used towards writing better online…..

Good tips, although I disagree with the edicts about “afterwards” and “towards.” They aren’t wrongedy-wrong-wrong like some of the other things on your list are wrong — they might be best described as preferred/standard American usage. But writing them off as wrong condemns a lot of English-speaking writers. And if an American writer chooses to use the “s” I don’t think it’s a crime. In Words on Words, a favorite guide to such fine points of language by John Bremner, he says: “Most authorities consider “toward” American and “towards” British. But a case can be made for “towards” as American usage when the following word begins with a vowel sound. There is a sibilant smoothness to “towards evening.”"

The one I see all the time that drives me nuts is lose/loose.

You “lose” a game.

The lid on your peanut butter is “loose”.

Love this post, and plan to forward it to lots of folks!

One of my pet peeves is everyday vs. every day. National advertisers get it wrong, so who can expect the average person to understand that everyday is an adjective, and every day is an adverb. If you can put the word “single” in between every and day and it still makes sense, use two words.

Example: Save money at XYZ Store every day!
Example: Shop the everyday savings at XYZ store!

Also, Princess Bride is a great movie, but also a laugh-out-loud phenomenal book for all ages!

GREAT POST. A pet peeve of mine is when I see REINS and REIGNS confused. As in “Take the reins” (take control…) REIGNS applies to an omnipotent ruler’s chronology of influence. Anyway, thanks so much. I learned some new ones!

Just as a note of interest, according to dictionary.com, the word hopefully is used properly in the sentence “Hopefully, we will get to the show on time”. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hopefully)

The entry does have a usage note at the bottom of the entry that delves a bit into the conflict regarding the word’s usage.

See what happens when I try to do fun stuff while dashing out the door?

That should be “The entry does have a usage note at the bottom that delves a bit into the conflict regarding the word’s usage” or possibly “There is a usage note at the bottom of the entry that delves a bit into the conflict regarding the word’s usage”.

Gah…

The “Literally” one drives me mad. Worse than any of the rest of these (I think I’m only guilty of “hopefully” — don’t really agree with you about “unique” though; I think that word has changed).

I think misuse of literally drives me mad because it’s SO MEANINGFUL when people use it in the way that it really is right that it diminishes a really powerful useage. People usually use it to mean “really,” so I wish they’d just say “really.”

Also, you left out using “disinterested” (which means “unbiased or without a vested interest”) when you really mean “uninterested.”

I always run into hurdles like this when writing blog posts. I try to use my best judgement but sometimes people will chime in and correct me.

Hehe, brilliant post idea. And helpful.

Jean, I predict you will love Princess Bride.

I could do a whole post on errors of pretention, usage errors caused by trying to sound smart. Those are the worst. I think that’s where folks get into trouble with “literally” and “irregardless.”

Wow – in all of my forty four years, no one has ever adequately explained the difference between who and whom. And the answer was so simple all along. Thanks.

@soniasimone
Love that “errors of pretention.” Let me know if you’re going to do a post on it – if you don’t, I will.

And if “unique” has become modifiable, I’m moving to another planet. Some things are holy.

This is brilliant and great for the not-so-savvy writer!

Adverse/Averse – Actually averse can also show distaste or opposition to something, not simply reluctance. (i.e., He was averse to the idea of relaxing that restriction.)

Unique – I would not entirely agree that using words like very or truly with unique is “wacked.” By wacked I assume you mean redundant and/or unncessary. Uniqueness can be applied technically to anything which varies in a previously unrecognized way, however minute or superficial. To say something is truly unique is to distinguish that the subject has nothing else even vaguely similar to it. Example: Adding a scratch to the hood of a car makes it, technically, unique. Changing the shape of the fenders, the composition of the roof, the layout of the lights, the size of the engine and the tint of the windows would make it very unique as it differs from the original in many characteristics.

As pointed out by several others the usage of afterward(s)/toward(s) and hopefully are open to regional/cultural influence as well as debate regarding when common acceptance becomes sufficient to gain critical acceptance.

As regards some comments:
Data is not always required to have a pluralized verb. It can also refer singularly to a collection of data, which may itself contain one or more datum.

a book is not “entitled” (it’s titled)
These are actually synonymous. Either one can refer to the granting of a title to an object.

A local substitution that greatly annoys both my wife and me is the use of ‘ignorant’ when the person means ‘rude.’

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Irregardless

So there.

Of course, keep in mind that “nice” means limited, stingy, stupid.

Well, I mean, it did… a couple of hundred years ago.

I’m surprised to see a blog focused on copy effectiveness conflate wrong word issues (insure/ensure, and the missing but equally frustrating affect/effect) with evolving language issues (afterwards, towards, hopefully). They’re very different, especially in a copywriting sense.

To reach your audience, you have to speak their language. You wouldn’t write copy for AARP using hip hop jargon, right? Well, the same goes for younger audiences and insisting on “whom” and formal constructions in sentences for which, normally, wrapping up, a proposition would be used.

English is an evolving language. While it makes sense to learn common mistakes and to be aware of the rules, you have to realize that there is no intrinsic meaning to any word, and writing to a modern audience means recognizing that “nice” means something different now than it did in the past.

@Brooks Re AARP — you’re not dissing us mature folks, are you?

Came here to disagree on “hopefully” – but I see that it’s been covered. So I’ll add:

There should be some kind of ranking for these – or at least put them into two categories. On the one hand, you have colloquial speech that, while it may be incorrect, can improve communication with your audience – such as “towards”, “few/less,” and “hopefully”.

On the other hand you have improper word usage that makes you look stupid – such as using the wrong form of to/too/two, Principal / Principle, and Irregardless.

@James Chartrand – Men with Pens:

Well, if it’s already unique, then of course, nothing is similar. Why add extra words that don’t belong? Truly unique is redundent. And fluffy

It’s a matter of which definition of unique you choose to use and how stringently you look at any variances/characteristics. As I stated previously, unique can be technically applied to something with a very minor difference as compared to something of a standard cast so long as that tiny variance has not existed before or does not currently exist. Technically, every owned or previously owned car is unique in that they have different license plates, different mileages, different wear patterns on the tires, etc. That is without introducing laws of probability and statistics that some percentage will have a defective or substandard part.

Generally speaking people won’t identify two different green 1994 Volkswagen Jettas as unique, though they could technically fit the descriptor. Drastic body and mechanical modifications made to one car can easily be seen as making it more unique (as compared to the baseline unmodified car) than would be simply applying a bumper sticker. Though so long as neither set of changes had been identically replicated elsewhere on otherwise identical cars, these would be two unique cars.

As such, I would posit that qualifiers like truly, very, more and less certainly do serve a function to distinguish the degree of uniqueness of a given subject as compared to its control.

Awesome post, and Princess Bride rocks.

One more definition for ‘principal’ that I don’t think anyone has mentioned —

4.
a. The capital or main body of an estate or financial holding as distinguished from the interest or revenue from it.
b. A sum of money owed as a debt, upon which interest is calculated.

From The Free Dictionary.

I was surprised also to not see affect / effect or a few other homonyms that cause trouble. It seems like a lot of people give up on those.

I can honestly say, I don’t have trouble with most of these — I attribute it to reading an enormous amount over my life, and growing accustomed to seeing words used correctly. Kind of how a child learns to speak, perhaps — they pick up patterns without knowing the reasons, and eventually they know the difference between ‘me’ and ‘you.’ How do they know that when their parent says ‘you’ to them, they should respond with ‘me’ or ‘I’?

TGN, that has always bugged me as well about degrees of uniqueness–every atom in the universe is unique, but to get Orwellian about it, some are more unique than others.

But “very unique” typically reflects sloppy thinking, rather than a cosmological meditation on the nature of sameness and uniqueness. I’m all for getting people to avoid it. I’d much rather see “unique among 1994 green Volkswagon Jettas” than “very unique,” which communicates nothing other than laziness.

@ TGN – I think I see what you’re saying. You and I have Jeeps. Yours has custom fenders. Mine has been completely ripped apart, customized and it’s a one-of-a-kind.

My jeep would be fully unique, as in the whole thing is unique.

Truly unique is an oxymoron, as Jean said (thank you, was searching for the word).

Your jeep would be partially unique. Only one part of the whole is unique.

Hm. Interesting conversation. Fun with language!

“Peruse” is another one that gets tossed around without people realizing that it actually means to “read with great care.”

Great post.

Everyone ought to have Fowler’s Modern English Usage next to their keyboard. He’s British & old but surprisingly hip.

For me, it’s a question of can you paint a realistic still life of a bowl of fruit, before something like a Picasso. Fundamentals need to be there, then rules can be broken.

Fowler has 3 pages on who/whom for instance & it’s available in paperback. Here’s an excerpt on affect/effect:

These verbs are not synonyms requiring differentiation, but words of totally different meaning, none of which can ever be substituted for the other. Affect…means have an influence on, produce an effect on, concern, effect a change in: effect means bring about, cause, produce, result in, have as result…

Terrific post, Brian! Love the comments too!
How nice to be assured that I am not the only anal-retentive reader out here!
Princess Bride rocks. Totally. Completely.

I hate to say this but… irregardless is now in the dictionary. Arrrg.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/irregardless

Hey, I’M not defending it. I’m just saying – you go look in dictionaries printed today, even the dictionary has to tell people it sucks.

I’m wondering when the dictionary had to start defending itself.

Dictionary publishers probably got sick of people writing in and saying “hey, you forgot to include the word ‘irregardless.’”

I understand that language changes and evolves. But some things that are common mistakes–so common that they’d fall under the “okay, so everyone uses it, when are we going to give in” category–are simply flat-out wrong. I get a little annoyed when people use the blanket “language evolves” argument. Language has rules to make things more clear. Changing the rules to fit usage rather than correctness makes things less clear.

Or, put another way: just because everyone’s doing it doesn’t make it right (see, Mom, I did listen to you when I was a teen).

@ Brooks – If Brian wrote like that, I’d stop reading lol

great post! love the Princess Bride refernce. I think I messed up the adverse/averse recently, but I can’t remember where…

I can’t help but add a misspelling to your list. In my opinion, it’s the most egregious on the Web:

“Loosing”, instead of “losing”

E.g. “I’m really having trouble loosing weight these days”.

Bah! It drives me nuts just thinking about it…

Boy, people sure are passionate about grammar.

97 comments…

The hopefully rule is disturbing.

Beautiful, I’m taking great notes from the comments, too. There are some real gems in here. I must admit to guilt with “hopefully,” but I vow to change my ways.

Thank you one thousand times for including “literally.” That one kills me every time. Not literally, of course.

May I also toss in good vs. well and bad vs. badly when referring to how someone feels? “How are you, Olivia?” “I’m well.” (Me: grrrr.)

“Have fun storming the castle!”

Good article.

I’m amazed by the number of times I’ve heard Pacific and specific mixed up recently. As (wrongly) in “to be pacific”.

How come nobody has mentioned “No sir, I stink, you smell.”?

I must say, going back and forth with this discussion is taking the curse off a day doing a PPT assignment.

@Jen: I’m wondering if it’s a midwestern thing. The roomie’s from Iowa and most of the people I’ve heard use those words in that way were from the midwest.

Any midwesterners want to weigh in on that?

Hey, Brian, no need to get personal. It’s just grammar, right?

You said that “The rule is you only use hopefully if you’re describing the way someone spoke, appeared, or acted.” The OED says “The traditional sense of hopefully is ‘in a hopeful manner’. In the 20th century a new use arose, with the meaning ‘it is to be hoped that’. Although this newer use is now very much the dominant one, it is regarded by some people as incorrect.”

Is it really a straw man for me to characterize your position as rejecting a change that happened many years ago? Or are you saying that because you acknowledged that some “rules” were obscure, your assertion about their correctness doesn’t count as a rejection of differing modern language? Are you sure “straw man” means what you think it does?

Sorry to have upset you. I enjoy your posts and writing and thought I was being constructive by pointing out the difference between insure/ensure, which are wildly different words, and afterward/afterwards, which are widely accepted as acceptable alternate versions of the same word in modern English.

Holy ^&$*#( batman!! LOL

This is getting a little ridiculous. Brooks, maybe you should look up straw man. I do believe that is what you are doing here. You actually had me questioning whether I know the proper usage of “straw man” or not. However, it appears that I do.

Note the phrases “based on a misrepresentation of an opponent’s position” and “carries little or no real evidential weight, since the opponent’s actual argument has not been refuted” in the quote below.

From Wikipedia:

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position.[1] To “set up a straw man,” one describes a position that superficially resembles an opponent’s actual view, yet is easier to refute. Then, one attributes that position to the opponent. For example, someone might deliberately overstate the opponent’s position.[1] While a straw man argument may work as a rhetorical technique—and succeed in persuading people—it carries little or no real evidential weight, since the opponent’s actual argument has not been refuted.[2]

I shared my first kiss with my ex over this movie. Now it makes me cry.

Thanks!

Pamir very wisely recommended Fowler’s MODERN ENGLISH USAGE; however, even better is Follet’s MODERN AMERICAN USAGE. The two books are perfect complements (redundant for emphasis) and outclass all other usage books that the others ought to be ignored if not tossed.

You missed out two of the most common misuses.
The inability of most people to distinguish between the transitive verb “to lay” and the intransitive verb “to lie”.

I think another good guideline for the usefulness of a rule is whether or not the misuse eliminates another words potentially useful meeting.

So, for example,

conflating ‘disinterested’ with ‘uninterested” you lose the useful and interesting meaning of the former (two words become one)
Same for “principal” and “principle” or “ensure” and “insure” or “ignorant” and “rude.”

Word.

Anyway, I agree that English isn’t a dead language (that’s why I differ on “unique,” which I don’t think is a very useful word as described above), but I think it’s worth having a debate about whether we lose something by letting certain incorrect useages go.

Here’s some more-authoritative information about “hopefully” and its changing usage from genuine language geeks (professional ones at that):

From:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005146.html

[...] DO YOU long for the not-so-distant days when people used “hopefully” correctly – as in “to travel hopefully” – rather than to modify a whole sentence, as in “Hopefully, today I will win the lottery”? [...] If so, you might be surprised that according to the Oxford English Dictionary, all these questions are based on a false premise. “Hopefully” has been used to mean “let us hope” since at least 1932. [...]

And from:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004495.html

[...] Hopefully. This doesn’t mean I hope. Hopefully, I’ll finish the report by noon. Do you mean you’ll finish the report in a hopeful frame of mind by noon? Or do you mean you hope you’ll finish the report by noon? Say what you mean: I hope to finish the report by noon.

Speaker-oriented (or “stance”) adverbial hopefully has been taking abuse pretty steadily for 30 or more years (see MWDEU). Linguists are mostly just baffled by this disparagement; see the discussion in the American Heritage Book of English Usage, where it’s noted that “hopefully seems to have taken on a life of its own as a shibboleth.” But the word fits right into long-standing patterns of the language — cf. frankly in “Frankly, this soup stinks” and surprisingly in “Surprisingly, this soup is delicious” — and it provides a way of expressing the speaker’s attitude towards a proposition which is both (a) brief and (b) subordinate: “I hope that S”, “I have a hope that S”, “It is to be hoped that S”, and the like are wordier, and have the hoping expressed in a main clause (as the apparent main assertion), while what writers want is to assert the proposition provisionally, adding a modifier expressing their attitude towards it. So speaker-oriented hopefully is a GOOD thing, and it’s no surprise that it’s spread so fast.

My favorite (recent) movie for dialog is The Princess Bride. Great stuff!

Hi Tony,

I agreed with all your entertaining observations, except one.
“truly unique”
Very unique, really unique, indeed this is blatant tautology, but, truly unique has a subtley different meaning to me.
To me, the intensifier is not referring to the level of ‘uniqueness’ which is, as you say, an impossibility, it’s referring to whether it is unique or not. A vote for the truth of the assertion that the aforementioned unique entity is indeed unique …

I liked your list though – only ones i am guilty of are afterwards / towards – but i never write them…

Can’t we really use afterwards with an ’s’? I looked it up and my Cobuild dictionary said that both afterwards and afterward are correct, but Americans use the word with no ’s’.

And thanks for the Farther / Further one. You have confirmed that my understanding is correct although I rarely see anybody around me use ‘farther’. I always try to use it when I mean to say about the distance.

Brian’s second paragraph apparently was missed by a few people who took issue with the “outrageous” idea of long-standing rules of grammar.

Before he even listed any misused words, he wrote:

“We know by now that great copy and content often purposefully breaks the rules of grammar. It’s only when you break the rules by mistake that you look dumb.”

If you know the rules, then you can break them when appropriate and effective; generally, though, people misusing words haven’t a clue what they’re doing.

I’m always amazed how touchy people get at the assertion of standards or the idea that something is more right than something else.

Jesse, I’m glad you quoted the line “We know by now that great copy and content often purposefully breaks the rules of grammar.” Don’t you think the verb should be “break”?

Thanks for the great word review and the movie recommendation. I’m from TX and I remember as a child writing a letter and asking my mother how to spell “svening” and she was confused until she said, “Use it in a sentence.” I said, “We’re going to the movies “svening”.. this evening. I still need help.

Great List

Thank you for taking time to compile this.. Should help us all.. I almost forgot a few of these

Princess Bride rocks. It’s where I first learned that somebody could be just be mostly dead and where I learned what true love is all about.

I like the idea of pointing out the issues so you can break the rules by design instead of by mistake.

For complement, I think of more compl*e*te. For principal, I think of the principal is your *pal.* Well, sometimes.

Here’s a couple more popular confusions:
1. right and wrong vs. correct and incorrect
2. precision vs. accuracy

I actually love when somebody distinguishes between precision and accuracy.

I used to wordsmith more and get into semantics, but then I learned a few more distinctions that changed my perspective:
1. Ethos trumps pathos trumps logos. Shining the spot light on word misuse forced a nose-dive straight to the logos playing field and broke rapport (and rapport precedes influence.)
2. There’s something to be said for code grooming, colloquialisms, and connecting.
3. It wasn’t valued. My editors cared, but my customers didn’t. It was another reminder of an above the line vs. below the line kind of thing.

… So I raised my frustration tolerance and a former peeve turned into a mild amusement. (I can still hear my Latin teacher espousing “right and wrong are moral terms …”)
Change the frame, change the game.

Nice one! Oh my goodness, I was using most of them all the time. lol!

This was fun, especially that I’m laughing at my own mistakes. lol! Thanks for sharin!

Before we got married, my ex wrote that he’d had “stake” for dinner. He was an engineer.

Brian, is this a record for number of responses to a post?

Since we’ve had such fun noting commonly misused words, does anyone want to take a crack at listing common punctuation errors?

I’ll start us off. My personal pet peeve is punctuation placed outside the quotation marks. Commas, periods, question marks, etc. should always go inside the quotes.

Thanks for a great post with entertaining comments. One of my pet peeves is idea/ideal. I had a coworker with many ideals.

@ Ryan – Anybody want a peanut?

@ Roxanne – when/whenever drives me nuts, too. I have found it to be common in the Texas/Oklahoma area. I have been able to correctly “peg” where someone grew up based on that.

Compliment/Complement: I once saw a wine label that said, “This wine compliments steak.” Apparently, it sits in the glass and says, “Hey, steak, you’re looking very juicy today!”

@Mike: “It’s” rather than “its” is one of my pet peeves. Did you ever hear that language expert William Safire wanted to buy a dog and name it Peeve?

@Brian: Something’s not quite right with your criteria/criterion. “If someone tells you they have only one criteria, you can quickly interject and offer that it be they get a clue.”

Can we also address “impact” as a verb? Grrrr.

I was taught that you use who when you would use he or she in a sentence. Then use “whom” when you would use him or her. That rule seems simpler than subject versus object! I love English and grammar, keep up the good work.

I LOVE that you used the line from The Princess Bride. It’s one of my all-time favorite shows. Your title made me read the post.

No more rhyming now….I mean it.

Does anybody want a peanut?

Great list, thanks for the informal/informative overview.

“Who cares about who/whom? No one of consequence.”

“I *must,* though.”

“Get used to disappointment.”

*shrug* ” ‘kay.”

—–

Well, that *almost* works.

LLOL: I’m literally laughing out loud. I love that people care so much; given the implications, I can’t help but infer my grammatical efforts are appreciated. ^_^ The only rules I break are those w/which I disagree. I quite willfully use towards & have likely used afterwards as well. Despite being American, I grew up reading British literature & write for the global audience that is the internet. It’s worth noting that “towards” is not underlined by spell-check whereas “afterwards” is.

The bottom line is that writers should have dictionaries at the ready but do ensure it’s one w/usage notes. ~_^ Then, if a word’s definition can be substituted for the word you’d like to use, use it. In accordance w/that advice, I’m hopefully now making clear which other rule I disagree with (BTW, ending w/a preposition is NOT always wrong). Regardless, another thing Princess Bride teaches us is that the words aren’t as important as the meaning ultimately conveyed.

(|_|*cheers*|_|)
“I’ve been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn’t listen. Every time you said ‘Farm Boy do this’ you thought I was answering ‘As you wish’ but that’s only because you were hearing wrong. ‘I love you’ was what it was, but you never heard.” — ‘Westley’ in “The Princess Bride”

“Moot,” like “sanction” and a fairly large number of other words, have more than one meaning, sometimes directly opposite the other.

@Rachel – I do believe you need to look up the word in the dictionary. It depends on the usage of the word whether it’s just myriad or “a myriad of”.

I really enjoyed reading this post. I would appreciate many more like this, as I believe these types of posts are vital to the strength of English writing.

I make these mistakes all the time. It drives me nuts. But I am always somewhat amused when topics like this come up. Why? Because language is dynamic. Once an incorrectly used word gains enough popular acceptance it becomes an acceptable word, much to the annoyance of purists. We don’t still speak in Middle English, after all. That does not mean I think it is OK to misuse words. Doing so makes me look ignorant. But language does evolve. ~jon

Thank you for writing this post! I am a funny poet who is going to publish his funny poetry book for kids. I use ‘towards’ instead of ‘toward’.

Hey, I just found your site from the post about this article over at performancing. Check the first post over there and you will find one that gives me headaches every time I see it.

This is in no way an attack on performancing, I rather like that site and now even more that it has lead me to your site, but that’s just wrong.

Sorry, late to comment, but I still had to chime in because the title of the post is awesome! The breakdown of the words is really helpful as well , and once those who have not seen Princess Bride check it out, I think they will really have an even better appreciation for the post.

I had my sister, who is in a management position look at my resume a couple of years ago. One of my statements was about a company owned by “my husband and me.” She called me and told me she was going to have to get on my case because of my grammar in this sentence. She told me it should be “owned by my husband and I.” I explained to her why I was right and she was wrong and she said, “well you shouldn’t use that because it just sounds wrong.” Sigh! My grammar is not perfect but I thought this was funny.

I printed this out earlier this week and posted it at all of my desks!

200 Comments — INCONCEIVABLE.

Anyone have a spell check that connects with my brain and the PC so that my computer knows what I wanted to say and not what I typed? Now that would be a great product!

I continue to type along and seem to always add a letter or leave one off when I type “your” and you” and my brain seldom picks up on that while I’m in forward motion. Anyone else do that or is it just me?

Henry Griner
http://whoishenry.com

I admire all the people who admitted they needed this post. The study of the craft of writing is a life-long venture. It is easier to live a long and happy life than to write well. (If you use this statement, I would appreciate your citing me as the source, as it has been my professional mantra for more than forty years.) The constant study should be an everyday thing, obviously. What is inconceivable to me is that people don’t use a prescriptive dictionary, don’t have the CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE, WORDS INTO TYPE, ELEMENTS OF STYLE, MODERN AMERICAN USAGE, and MODERN ENGLISH USAGE at their fingertips. The study of etymology and confusibles should also be incorporated. Anyone who has not read ON WRITING WELL and THE MOTHER TONGUE is missing delightful reading. One protege said, “If everyone wrote as interestingly about language as that, I’d read about it more.”
Love the word; it is God’s most precious gift.

Great topic.

‘Literally’ seems to be the most common error I notice, I’ve given up on the majority of people ever using it correctly.

One that I think wasn’t mentioned in the original post was the confusion between ‘alternative’ (= a choice between two things) and ‘alternate’ (= swinging back and forth between two things).

My pet hate though is misuse of the apostrophe particularly in ITS / IT’S

It should only ever be written IT’S if you mean IT IS. If you are using it as a possessive eg its tail, then there’s no apostrophe.

Of course, people commonly get the possessive apostrophe wrong anyway, but even those who understand that rule seem not to understand that ITS TAIL should not be written IT’S TAIL.

Don’t get me started on bear versus bare, chose used instead of choose and eg confused with ie.

And at school I learnt things are ’similar to’ and ‘different from’ but as far as I can tell I’m the only person who doesn’t say ‘different to’.

I will have to go back and read all the other comments so I can empathise with other equally perfect linguists.

Ok, this isn’t a misused word, but it is a commonly misspelled word – and the funny part is that I even found it in one of your comments. GRAMMAR

I once knew a girl who had this quote in her profile: “Don’t speak to me if you don’t have good grammer.” Ohhhh, the irony.

In my foreign language classes, I’ve learned quite a bit about English and how it is used, due to the fact that I am gaining an outside perspective. I do not believe correct usage is quite as important as being understood, because when it all comes down to it, language is used for communication. Nitpicking over usage just confuses things in an already confused language, as we do NOT have the Académie de Anglophone stepping up to draw up standards.

That said (or rather typed), this is a very interesting guide on how things have changed and common mistakes.

I remember reading about how “bald” used to mean “white haired” once, and that when I looked it up, “cute” meant “lame” in my 1800s dictionary.

Sidra said: “May I also toss in good vs. well and bad vs. badly when referring to how someone feels? “How are you, Olivia?” “I’m well.” (Me: grrrr.)”

Why are you going “grrr”? Isn’t that the correct usage, as opposed to mysteriously growing angel wings?

Excelent post, I will keep it handy for the future.
It has been a long time since I was in High School, and I can’t believe how much I have forgotten about the English language.

The one that makes me steam…

Capitol vs Capital

people commonly mistake should’ve for should of or could of. The correct use is could have or should have.

Do you have a blog entry on the complete and utter misuse of the word ironic?

The one I hate is “proverbial” – which means “referring to or coming from a specific proverb.” That word is rarely used correctly.

ONLY

Less precise: “…. The old school rule is you only use hopefully if you’re describing …

More precise: “…. The old school rule is you use hopefully only if you’re describing..”

or,

Less precise: “Insure is only correct when you call up Geico…”

More precise: “Insure is correct only when you call up Geico…”

Only sayin’
`(:)

Hey Brian,

This list was awesome. I’ve rehabbed two words I’ve been abusing in conversation and I’ve splashed my subconscious with a refresher of how not to mangle the others.

I can tell this list took some work and I genuinely appreciate your help.

Note Taking Nerd #2
http://www.mynotetakingnerd.wordpress.com

Fralick’s link to Williams is broken.

Thanks, my friend. I really appreciate it.

Another word I experienced today: Unstability
Unstable is a word found in the dictionary nut Instable is not.
Instability is found in a dictionary but Unstability is not.
A search for the word “unstability” returns many occurances of this word in technical papers from surprising sources.

Me fail English? That’s unpossible.

- Ralph Wiggum

This is excellent! I am frequently ranting about this very issue. People don’t understand the mistakes they make and how it makes them look. I wish everyone who ever writes anything would read this.

As you wiiiiiiiiiishh!

My favorite misuse of “literally”:

“She’s literally on a roller coaster to hell.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22206614/

Honestly, you had me with the Princess Bride reference.

As a recovering English major, I had to stop reading the post because I was having flashbacks.

Watch out for the R.O.U.S.!

Thanks for the laugh! I really should buy that movie.

I, of course, loathe the “they’re there their” debacle, but the one that drives me absolutely spare is when people use cloths in place of clothes. Yes, most of the time, it is technically correct; that is, most clothes are made of cloth, but it’s not what the auther means. It’s like if someone used paper when they should use book, or water when they mean ice.

I agree with OneEyedCarmen (and Ashleigh). I was taught to never end a sentence with a preposition. The correct format is “About whom are you going to write?”, as I learned it.

I love posts like this. The comments are almost as entertaining as the post.

And, yeah (oops, faux pas there, I’m sure), The Princess Bride made me roll off my chair and onto the floor in tears of laughter!

I teach astronomy for UMUC online. There are several misused and confused words that you missed that really make me growl. (Thank goodness I teach online, eh?)

1) Accept vs Except. Hate, hate, hate that college students don’t know the difference! I refuse to accept it. No exceptions!

2) Supine and prone. Supine is face up prone is face down.

3) Me and . ARGH!

4) Astronomy vs Astrology. An automatic F when the latter is used for the former (oddly, the reverse never happens).

5) People really need to read and refer to “Elements of Style.” Without the cutsy pictures. Get a nice, old, used copy.

“I” versus “me”

Example: “If you have any questions, call Charles or I.” LOL

My daughter was speaking with a woman about children during a massage. After their session, she came over to me and said she was sad because the woman was inconceivable. I asked what she meant… She said… “Because she couldn’t get pregnant.” I laughed so hard and still crack a smile when I think of both my daughter and Inigo. I do not think it meant what she thought it meant. lol

@carmen: You made an Inigo Montoya yourself. Splitting a prepositional phrase and putting the preposition at the end is not a dangling participle. See http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/d.html

Also, most grammarians today find the practice acceptable. See http://www.dailywritingtips.com/go-ahead-put-that-preposition-at-the-end/

Thanks for that link, Dickness. Very interesting point of discussion. When you have a moment, scroll up to read the discussion regarding the use of “truly unique” (if something is unique, by definition it is one of a kind, there is nothing else like it; therefore there can be no levels of uniqueness and something can’t be truly or more unique; it can be unusual or truly special, but never “truly unique”, either it’s unique or it’s not)

Oh, a joke, I get it now
Humor doesn’t always translate well online, especially between virtual strangers (in our case, wouldn’t “virtual strangers” be an oxymoron?). Have a super Saturday, Dickness!

Wow… I hate to admit this but I never knew there was a “complement”. You missed a big one though: Affect vs. Effect! Great post!

Great post and comments! My two cents:

i.e. – e.g.
economic – economical
loose – lose (it has been already mentioned but it is my favorite)

Serge

I think the word “random” should be added to the list as well. “Literally” bothers me the most out of all of those. I’ve heard people say “My legs literally turned to jelly” and “your world was literally turned upside down”.

Um… you mean figuratively right?

Annoys me to no end.

nice info about the misused words

Awesome list, many pf my pet peeve are already among your examples. I’d add this one, somewhat related to “criterion/criteria”:

Phenomenon / Phenomena

In fairness, both words can only be truly understood if one happens to have enjoyed some basic Ancient Greek 101 in their schooling somewhere, which I did way back in the day. There are professors and all kinds of other smart and accomplished people who get these two wrong.

One big problem with pointing out these mistakes: The receiver of your well-meant advice almost never takes well to the correction. It’s one of the prime violations mentioned in Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends & influence people”, and your rapport may never quite recover from it.

Instead, you can hope that they find a resource like yours somewhere and see the “grammatical light.”

So in my view it’s best to just smile knowingly, and let it go. As you said, some mistakes are becoming so common that they become, well, the new standard; all language is based on convention after all.

BTW, here’s another: I cringed every time during the election season when someone (did Hillary start it?) falsely said – “The change I will make…” – by which presumably they were not referring to the act of giving back coins and smaller bills to break up larger ones.

The correct phrasing would have been “make changes” or “to create change”…

I agree with Holly. However there is no reason to utilize an alternative to the word use which is suitable for all occasions.

What a great post. Gives me hope for the future.
Here are two more words that get mixed up sometimes: pore & pour. Correct: “She pored over the document” (Please, not “…poured over the document.” I’ve seen it that way quite a bit lately, drives me nuts.)

Inigo Montoya is my heroe!
Movie was great, but the book is even better!
Great (and useful!) post, thanks!
(I know the whole who/whom thing but using whom often
makes people stop listening to you. And want to slap you.)

Can we make up a general rule about adding syllables to words that don’t exist? Like ‘real-i-tor’ when the correct pronunciation is ‘real-tor’. Or ‘real-i-ty’ instead of ‘real-ty’.

The rule would read: “don’t add imaginary syllables.”

What about because/since? As I understand it, “since” should be used for referencing time. “Since my childhood…” “Since 1980…”

I see people use it to show cause/effect …”Since you broke the lamp, you can replace it.”

Also, I have some questions about things that I hear spoken.
I hear people say “heighth” instead of height.
“I got it for free.” instead of “I got it free.”

Are these ever correct?

I have a friend who used to travel two additional blocks (each way) in order to patronize the grocery store with the express line for shoppers buying “10 items or fewer” instead of “10 items or less.”

Also, here are two words whose usage I do not yet accept, and do not expect to accept (not except) any time soon:

-commentator (no need for the “ta” syllable, unless you’re describing an easily found spud)

-service used in place of serve (my father has reminded me often that service is what a bull does to a cow)

——–
Mawwiage . . . is what bwings us togethew today. Wuve . . . twoo wuve . . . that dweam within a dweam . . .

This one is rather unusual…heard most often from the mouths of television or radio news readers:

Confusion between incidents and incidences.
An incident is an event. The plural is incidents.
Incidence refers to a rate of occurrence–e.g., a high incidence of crime. The plural is incidences. Its use is quite rare (except, perhaps, among statisticians). E.g., the incidences of crime and of police overtime assignments is inversely proportional. The news readers often use incidences when the should use incidents.

I didn’t see two of my pet peeves. Oh, believe me, I have more than two. LOL My grandmother was a poet and former English teacher, and my mother and I are completely anal with spelling and grammar because of her teachings. I do misspell things sometimes, but when I catch it, I beat myself up like you wouldn’t believe.

But here’s two that make me cringe:

“peak/pique” and “heel/heal”

If your interest is “piqued,” that means someone’s grabbed your attention. If it’s “peaked” then that’s all the attention you have to give – it’s all downhill from there. There IS a difference!

And your “heel” is on your foot. You DO NOT “rock on your heals.” (ahhh – it was painful to even write the incorrect version. oh I HATE that!) You *heal* from an injury. Big difference.

Okay – two more: “jewelry/jewlery”. It’s NOT “joo-ler-ee” for God’s sake. (what is a “jewle”? nothing! that’s what! That’s why it’s not “jewlery”!)

And yes, the “loose/lose” thing drives me insane. I so agree with everyone else there. I had to beat my own daughter for that one – she picked that up from someone (probably the same girl who told her that you had to have sex constantly for 7 days straight to get pregnant) and I sat her down until she got it right.

I will say though – I was in a discussion not too long ago about contractions: especially with “its/it’s”. (BTW – I hate it when people don’t know when to use the possessive vs. plural – so they just add ” ’s” to the end of everything.) When I was in grade school, we were actually taught a third version: “its’ ” which was representative of the possessive AND plural – but it was only used with the word “it.” I’ve since discovered that “its’ ” is incorrect, and believe me, it’s sometimes difficult for me to forget it. I find myself backing up quite often to correct that mistake, and some days I’d like to find the teachers that taught it to me and beat them silly.

Oh, now I’ve gone too far. My biggest pet peeve has been exposed for the world to see! I’m going to shut up now!

Brian you should have enough information from these comments to write similar blog entries through the end of the year. But I’m astounded that with all these literary people weighing in, there were only two references to the novel – which by the way blows away the very good movie.

If you like the movie, set aside some time and read the book. Once you start, you won’t want to stop -even though you know what’s coming next. Some of the best parts never made it to the movie (can you say Zoo of Death).

By William Goldman.

Doug, you forgot the trees. Oh, how it would have been awesome if they included all the “tree” stuff in the movie

(and I actually know someone who insists the book that Mr. Goldman refers to all the time actually exists – she won’t believe that there’s no such book. Every time we go to a bookstore, she makes them try and find it. ::rolls eyes::)

And I agree – if you haven’t read the book – do so. The book is *always* better than the movie. (the only exception: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Oh, that book sucked big time.)

I reread this post today and realized that two of my own pet peeves havn’t been mentioned.

1. Different than vs different from. I keep hearing people saying things like “My car is different than yours,” and it grates on me every time. Your car may be bigger than (substitute: faster than, older than, heavier than) mine, but it all adds up to its being different from mine.

2. The loss of the Serial Comma. Okay, so we may salute the red, white and blue. That looks okay, but what if I want to thank my parents, Mother Theresa and the Pope? Check out this wonderful book on punctuation: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynn Truss.

Thanks for providing that link to who vs whom, Patrick! However, I read her rationale and I believe Miss Grammar Girl unknowingly typed the same sentence twice, or there is a typo, or she intended it to be redundant for emphasis. Because the critical sentence explaining the difference between who and whom makes no sense:

“So remember, you use whom when you are referring to the object of a sentence. Use whom when you are referring to the object of a sentence.”

Ho hum,

A. Little Bird

We’ll you got me with the Princess Bride quote and I didn’t stop laughing. I actually found myself correcting the reporter on the morning news because he misused “fewer.” And in college I used to cringe every time a roommate used the word “irregardless”. Didn’t know about “Hopefully” so I learned something. Thanks!

Great stuff, many are personal pet peeves, especially irregardless. Unfortunately, I have to clarify your comments on that one. According to Webster: “The most frequently repeated remark about it is that ‘there is no such word.’ There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still along way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead.”

Regardless of Webster’s acknowledgement, I still cringe whenever I hear it!

Excellent list. Excellenter commentary. One quibble:

“Whom are you going to write about?”

My mother would gouge out the eye of a passing stranger if she heard someone end a sentence with a preposition. Wouldn’t “About whom are you going to write?” be more correct?

I constantly violate almost all these rules. I am printing this list and placing it right next to my laptop. It’s a great reference tool to get up to speed on fixing my grammar issues.

Great work!

You missed one I hear all the time — antidote vs. anecdote!

It seems that no one can use the word “is” anymore without repeating it.
Not in the correct way, as in “What the real problem is, is that…”
Even our eloquent President isn’t immune to this verbal tic.

My favorite seems to appear with conservative Christians: God convicted me to ___.

I believe they mean convinced but with greater emphasis?

My list has 40, but only 5 are repeats of yours. Vocabulary abuse is, indeed rampant! Check out these Top 40 Vocabulary Pet Peeves, but warning… you may cringe on a few that you have misused.

You forgot “than” and “then”. I always see bloggers who misuse these.

this post is great. thank you.
also,
decimate
evacuate
admission/admittance

Best trick I’ve ever learned about who vs. whom:

If the answer is “him,” add the “m.”

Right: Who is going to the fair?
Hint: He is going to the fair.

Right: To whom do I give this book?
Hint: You give the book to him.

The Princess Bride has long been a family favorite in the Reid household. I liked the post all the more because of the tie in and plug for this great film. It made me add the blog to my Google reader. Thanks for the lesson.

@TGN etc. I’m a little late to the party here, and agree with some posters that ‘truly unique’ generally displays sloppy writing however, I think I agree with TGN – it’s not necessarily incorrect (though I’m not sure it’s for the same reasons).

Surely ‘truly unique’ can be used as a method of differentiating something that is unique from other things which have been erroneously dubbed unique e.g.

“The new coffee machine from CoffeeBean is unique” (when in fact it’s pretty much the same as all coffee machines in existence)

As opposed to: “The new coffee machine from Perfect Cup is truly unique” (because it really is unique – it’s a brand new design and a brand new way of building a coffee machine that has never been seen before, and the person marketing it is aware of competitors’ similar, yet false, claims)

Admittedly, this is a pretty unlikely situation, but it seems to me a good example of a perfectly feasible use of ‘truly unique’.

Oh, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve noticed one of these mistakes – and that’s just the ones I actually noticed. Thanks for a terrific list AND the explanations of them. This is something that will be printed and placed in my book of “common mistakes when writing” that I’ve been building and accumulating over the years. I am kind of surprised that you didn’t include a very common one that I see – their, they’re, & there. In fact, a nickel for every one of those would definitely improve my financial status. This article is an excellent resource and I’ll recommend it to everyone that I know.

very useful way

Nice collection … here’s a pitch for capital and capitol. I used both (correctly) on the same page of a brochure, and got chewed out in a staff meeting by a young lady who thought she knew everything. Next day, after providing printouts of definition/use pages, she apologized – to me, but not to the whole group!
Thanks for great blog.

A few that irritate me…

When contractions become the norm, but are incorrectly expanded. ‘Should have’ became ’should’ve’ when was re-expanded to become ’should of.’

Next, the popular press’ inability to distinguish ‘brave’ from ’stoic.’ A 6 year old boy with cancer or a broken leg is NOT brave, he is stoic in the way he deals with the situation.

On a similar line, why do the press identify so many things as being contrary to the bible? After-all, that’s the meaning of ‘controversial.’

One final comment. If you were to follow modern/popular usage, you’d have to accept that the sole use of an apostrophe is to warn the reader that the letter S is imminent.

Let me re-write that.

One final comment. If you were to follow modern/popular u’sage, you’d have to accept that the ’sole u’se of an apo’strophe i’s to warn the reader that the letter ‘S i’s imminent.

Cheer’s !!

I would like to add since/as to the list above. Since is ONLY temporal; as is causal. So it should never be ’since it is hot in here, I am going to open the window’, but ‘as it is hot in here, I am going to open the window’. Very rarely do I see SINCE in the right place, and AS I have a degree in English and a PhD in a related subject, this is all the more painful.

Please stop people from saying “A whole “nother” …” Nother is not a word. Ever. Even people on the news and in office say this. It makes my ears bleed.

Thank you for this brief blurb. I am often confused about the correct use for certain words.

In addition, The Princess Bride is one of the funniest movies in history. A classic.

Oh my, I hope Jen was joking. The correct sentence would be “data *is* plural”.

data noun (originally plural but now generally treated as singular) 1 one or more pieces of information or facts, especially those obtained by scientific observation or experiment. 2 a collection of information in the form of numbers, characters, electrical signals, etc, that can be supplied to, stored in or processed by a computer.

From Chambers UK dictionary

This post is the gift that keeps on giving, and I’m always delighted to see another comment!

Danielle, your husband gets a gold star for noticing the erroneous Post-It order. Written chronologically, the one at the top would have been on the bottom layer, with the others stacking over it and descending downward.

By the way, I don’t see pedantry as a negative thing. If there are enough language snobs to balance out the language slobs, we may arrive at something in the middle we can live with.

Damn you Brian Clark. After reading a few of your articles it’s clear to me that I have a lot more reading to do! ) Now…to try to find the time…

Another irritation! (warning… grumpy old man mode engaged!)

Why is it that over the past few years, Politicians have started “taking decisions?” Seems to me that previously they “made decisions.”

Why is this? Why is it it that these Politicians sound like they’ve brought along a bucket-full of decisions and taken one out at random. ‘Making’ a decision conveys the suggestion that the decider was actually involved in the creation of the decision.

While we’re on the topic of proper English, I thought I’d bring up the common mistake in writing of using hanging prepositions. For example, in your entry you wrote: ” Whom are you going to write about?”

As it’s a pet peeve of mine, I thought I would inform everyone that the correct syntax would be, “About whom are you going to write?”

Why? Because I’m anal…

Hang on Mark, if you are including prepositions before commas then you go far beyond anyone else who holds to this rule. Of course “us all makes mistakes”, but to teach them to paying students is a serious issue. I hope your statement that you will be teaching this rule of Latin and French in an English grammar course is a result of that sense of humour you are talking about.

My Grammar & Spelling Nazi Salutes You!

I always misuse afterwards and afterward.