Just recently I was in a conversation with a number of UK mainlanders and we had a debate over what “tories” meant, apparently disproportionately ordinarily it refers to a political party and it’s not usual to use it as short for “territories” as I’ve used it (according to how the debate ended, it was half and half between them). And once again I’m reminded of how people feel to look back at their usage of a word/phrase over the years and cringe.
More tragically, me and a friend were embarrassed once upon realizing everyone was confusing “encephalitis” with “hydrocephalus” when talking to someone about their kid with hydrocephalus. Awkward because encephalitis is caused by HIV.
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Encephalitis is caused by viral infections. Our immune system usually suppresses said viruses, and HIV takes away the ability to suppress them.
This happens with a lot of illnesses… thrush, Tuberculosis, fungal infections. HIV allows a lot of stuff to have far worse impact than it normally would.
That’s not quite the same as HIV causing them… Pedantic maybe, but since we’re talking about words meaning things… ;)
Encephalitis literally just means “in the brain inflammation”.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/encephalitis
This brain inflammation can be caused by many things. Quote from Mayo Clinic:
Encephalitis is inflammation of the brain. There are several causes, including viral infection, autoimmune inflammation, bacterial infection, insect bites and others.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/encephalitis/symptoms-causes/syc-20356136
It can also be caused by prions. Mad cow disease is aka bovine spongiform encephalitis. I believe the word just indicates cell death in the brain which leaves regions of dead tissue.
True, but in the context of talking about someone’s child in my local culture, it raises an eyebrow or two if the other person doesn’t associate the two conditions.
Table might count for me here.
I grew up in America and “a bill was tabled” means that a bill was removed from consideration there… while as in Canada it means the precise opposite “a bill was tabled” means it was introduced for debate.
I don’t use the term often in common speech, but I was really confused reading political news when I first arrived.
So did you table your use of
tableor was it tabled and therefore, still on the table?in America and “a bill was tabled” means that a bill was removed from consideration
Really?
In Canada to remove from consideration the term is “shelved”, just in case that’s different. Tables and shelves, what’s with these terms? (probably what happened with the physical paper it was written on.)
Yea, and the Cambridge dictionary backs me up here https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/tabled
UK
to suggest something for discussion:
An amendment to the proposal was tabled by Mrs James.
US
to delay discussion of a subject:
The suggestion was tabled for discussion at a later date.
Just because it has been brought to the table doesn’t mean it will go anywhere else. “Tabling” a discussion suggests that we are stepping away from the table for now. We are taking away any deal we have struck, but leaving behind any issue still under contention. Maybe we will bring it up when we come back, maybe not.
We use “tabling” in much the same sense as the idiom “leaving money on the table”, meaning “concluding a transaction without demanding all consideration owed to you”.
Tabling means it’s brought for discussion, it doesn’t need to go anywhere else.
The other idiom even has to specify leaving the table.
It absolutely does need to go somewhere else. The issue under discussion is not yet operational. It’s not yet a law, or part of a contract. While it is on the table, it is nothing more than hot air. The participants have to come to a consensus and carry it away from the table as an agreement before it becomes actionable.
Tabling an issue means it isn’t progressing into operation. It’s still on the negotiating table, but we are moving on to other, more pressing issues for the time being.
…discussions are discussions. They don’t need to lead somewhere for the discussion to happen, ie the discussion to be brought to the table.
Then it is shelved. Basically for a later dated. Tabled is where the discussions take place.
Verbing weirds language.
and languaging weirds verbs
We can also compoundwordly languageweird!
I was homeschooled and was basically educated by books, so I have a massively large vocabulary and I mostly use it correctly.
But pronunciation? I’m fucked.
You have “a massively large vocabulary” and couldn’t think of anything other than “massively large”? 🤔
I was raised by dyslexic wolves in a dixie cup full of turds and was basically educated by punches, so naturally my encyclopedic repertoire of words is aptly humbled by the plentiful platitude of my somewhat planar pronunciation.
ah. youve read the mormon bible.
I take your point, but pleaser consider: People who like show off their checks thesaurus prodigious vocabularies are generally insufferable to be around.
I’ll clap for prodigious and the insult!
My vocabulary is big huge!
My wife is the same. Very well read, but never learned the pronounciation of her fancy words.
Imagine the look on her face when I explained that the “hors d’oeuvres” she read about in books are the same thing as the “or durves” she was serving at the party.
I had the opposite, I always thought the word “grandiose” I saw in books was the word “grandeur” that I hear people say, so I always read “grandiose” as “grandeur” and thought “grandeur” was spelled that way. Whenever I heard people say “gran-di-ose” I would pipe up"uh, akshewly, it’s pronounced grandeur, the s is silent".
Very similar to this, on multiple occasions I’d try to make macarons and accidentally make macaroons and vice versa.
My son is a voracious reader, and he has the same thing. He’s 15 now but still, every so often, he’ll say a word and it’ll take me a minute to figure out what he means.
With my accent I’m told this is a common issue for me. Not that I notice, even when pointed out.
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I don’t really value pronunciation as much as some do. If you understand what you’re talking about, that matters more than being exposed and remembering the right pronunciation.
So many words we never hear people say, but we read them and have to know them.
Freedom.
Apparently where I live it means torture people till they off themselves.
Its doublespeak then or something
Either you’re being edgy or you live somewhere truly horrendous.
USA
The why not both option.
Curious now to know where you live. That sounds like a rough culture.
Sounds like a yank. Poor sod.
How about " till " in English vs " 'til " ?
In English, a till is a cash drawer or a plough. The abbreviation for “until” is " 'til ".
I see it in subtitles. I worry for society.
TIL
🤣🤣
Even happened in the comments here
Haha, sorry to confuse things further but this is not true .
Tldr, “till” is its own word and is actually older than the word until, and they’ve been used synonymously for centuries. 'Til with an apostrophe is acceptable but has been less common, and til without an apostrophe is even less common.
“Shop till you drop” now has a whole new meaning.
Oh in English – I used to say renumerate (numerate a second time) instead of remunerate (pay someone for a thing).
Me too!! I’m Italian and I used to say “renumerare” instead of “remunerare”.
If you’re curious, the verb comes from Latin “munus” = service/duty/tax
Yup, that makes sense!
I’ve cornered the market on Latin-Vietnamese cross-language humor though. Stay off my turf :P
holy… well, blow me.
I have never heard nor saw it spelled “remunerate”.
Yup, that was the case for me too. I think I only figured it out when I was like 30.
Man, I’m a voracious reader, my heads full of words I probably put the wrong emphasis on but it ain’t like when i was younger when i would completely and consistently mispronounce words i could spell, and no one would correct me, because they didn’t know either. But this one, I absolutely would have caught this one. Every author, reporter, newscaster, writer I can think of, has apparently spelled or pronounced it wrong and seems it’s in some dictionaries, i just learnt.
Ah yeah, that was me as a kid too. I read whatever I could get ahold of, which was mostly English and French from 50+ years ago (yay, secondhand books and copyrights expiring). So my vocabulary in both languages was (and occasionally remains) antiquated. My pronunciation fixed itself some time after university, but was weird in my youth.
I’ve since de-prioritized human language, for practical reasons. Communicating with machines efficiently is simply much more productive (and lucrative)! My shorthand also is it’s own language, where there is no distinction between letters and numbers, of which there are 16, and they phonetically map to English. Hexadecimal English, or Hexen for short. It’s optimized for writing quickly (every character is precisely 1 stroke).
Quite handy for taking notes around people I don’t want reading them, too.
Holy shit. You ever have that moment when you realize you’re talking to someone way the fuck smarter than you? I understand what you’re doing, good explanation, but I don’t want to play chess against you.
Truth be told, I’m terrible at chess (so… you’re not wrong). Games where I have perfect knowledge of the state of play, and where one player moves first, I don’t enjoy much. For each of these games, there provably exists a strategy where the first player that moves can only win or draw. This strategy is trivial for tic-tac-toe, known for checkers, but unknown for chess (although we know it exists). Anyway, just knowing that sort of ruins it for me.
Anyway, I know that feeling well! I’m not that smart, I just study a few subjects a lot. There are just so many things I don’t know, that it’s easy to find people I can learn from.
Games where I have perfect knowledge of the state of play, and where one player moves first, I don’t enjoy much. For each of these games, there provably exists a strategy where the first player that moves can only win or draw
That doesn’t seem quite correct for any game meeting those criteria (I’d also add that the game is deterministic - no true randomness in the game either, since that is distinct from state - otherwise the outcome could trivially depend on random events). There are two other possibilities for a deterministic game: that optimal gameplay by both players will always end in the second (or another player if more than two) winning, or that optimal gameplay by both players will result in a game that never ends (impossible for games with a finite number of states, and rule that the game ends in an outcome if the same state recurs too many times - like chess).
A trivial example of a (poor) game that would meets your criterion but where the first player loses under optimal strategy: Players take turns placing a counter anywhere in the play area from an infinite supply of counters. Players cannot skip a turn. If there are an even number of counters on the board after a player’s turn, the player who placed the counter can optionally declare victory and win. Not a game I’d play, but it does prove there exist deterministic open state games where one player moves first where the first player will not win or tie.
In a 3+ player deterministic open state game, the actions of a player who goes on to lose could impact which of the remaining players win (they are essentially just a different source of non-determinism).
I think it is correct to say that any two-player deterministic open-state game which can only end in a draw, win, or tie, for any fixed initial conditions, there exists a strategy for one of the two players that will ensure that one of the three outcomes occurs: the game continues forever, that player draws, or that player wins. That can be proved by contradiction: either one or more move in the strategy decision tree can be improved to make the player win, which contradicts the strategy not existing, or the other player can rely on the strategy not existing for the first player to devise a strategy, which also contradicts no strategy existing for either player.
every word i use is right, its the english language that is wrong
One could say language is what we make of it.
I used the term ‘pursuant’ incorrectly for a long time. I thought it meant something like ‘things you do in order to achieve something’, like sweeping the floor is pursuant to getting the kitchen clean, vs the correct usage, which is either ‘in accordance with’, or ‘in a manner conformable to’. So a correct usage would be ‘sweeping the floor is pursuant to the procedure we set up to clean the kitchen’. Nice word, though. I like it.
As a foreigner I would have made that same mistake, since it sounds like it’s related to pursuit. Educational comments in this
sweeping the floor is persuant to the procedure…
Its more often used in formal and legal stuff. I’d kinda perceive you were being an ass or condescending if you were to use it that way. Like its just an annoying word generally.
You might want to simply say “please do x like I showed you” or somethi ng like that. I would honestly never use persuant unless I was a prosecutor even though I’m intimately familiar with its use in legal and other academic writing.
Just don’t use it
I cooked my poptart perfectly pursuant to the packaged directions?
Why not just say I made/had a poptart? Why do you need to get that descriptive about it, its junkfood that you just eat or pop in the toaster, hence the name. Is like a tart you pop in the toaster
Worst case, use according but I don’t get why you’d ever need to say that. Nobody who speaks English would really ever say that, that sounds like a textbook exercise lol
“As per my previous emails…”
Thankfullfy just her and myself in the car, and the first time I used the phrase aloud : I once excitedly exclaimed how I loved my friend’s “thunder thighs”.
Totally thought it meant powerful thighs, like in nice and physically fit shape.
🤡
(Not long-term use, but felt the same vibe)
“I’m sorry, is ‘your rear is as creamy as a bowl of oatmeal’ not a compliment?”
“Your acne is like braille for your beauty”
I hate this so much!
I didn’t realize “effect” and “affect” were different words for a long time.
It’s freeing to just use whatever one you want with zero effect.
I always used the two as different tenses of the same word except for the fact that “affect” can also be the verb form of “affectionate”.
What about æffect?
You just summoned a dæmon.
cræp
The arrow affected the aardvark.
The movie had great special effects.Somewhat grim for the poor aardvark, I suppose. It’s useful though.
That’s a good way to remember it.
Honestly, you can pretty much always use effect unless you’re affecting a fancy manner.
I am strongly in favor of depreciating affect.
You may find you mean deprecating.
Depreciating is reducing in value due to time, deprecating is disapproving of (or in software, marking as obsolete)
Sigh, that one I can legitimately blame on autocorrect and adhd.
I thought “long COVID” meant “lung COVID” because in dutch long = lung
Neither would be wrong.
I happily described a nice coffee shop as “kitschy” to the guy behind the counter and quickly learned from his reaction that it isn’t the synonym for “artsy” that I thought it was.
It means “a naive imitation” for anyone who’s ears are turning red now. Puts on a wool cap.
I thought something similar about the word “campy”, as in something so dry it becomes its own style.
Nothing too big or embarrassing, but for a while I thought “nepotism” just meant the same as “narcissism” when it’s actually about favoritism towards one’s family.
I thought penultimate meant …basically ultimate
Am doofus
Penultimate is a mightier word, even mightier some might say, than the swordultimate.
Touché
As they say, live by the swordultimate, die by the swordultimate.
It’s the word’s fault, not yours.
Well you were close. Some might say you were right next to it n
Binge watch all of Taskmaster, you’ll never use it wrong again
One of my professors would regularly use the word antepenultimate, “before before last”.
when you’re reading linguistics literature & forums you’ll see variations all the way up to “propreantepenultimate” (fifth last) commonly
meanwhile in Italian you’d just see “quintultimo” but fuck those guys amirite
Ah, that works much better in Italian!
One related word I have mixed feelings about is ‘antediluvian’. On one hand, it’s got a nice ring to it. On the other hand, there are enough floods in my area that it translates to “more than a short time ago”, which feels contrary to it’s intended usage.
Some people might require a flood of biblical proportions. We get those less frequently, but in practice, still too often for the word to be used as intended.
On a semi-related note, I accidentally stumbled on a temple the other day that looked Buddhist, but the symbology had far too many tentacles and various statues had… unusual numbers of limbs. Perhaps the core issue is that I apparently live in R’lyeh. Still… affordable housing on land risen from the deeps, not much pollution or traffic. Google maps can be a bit glitchy. Fresh (if highly unusual) seafood.
I mean I do see it used that way more often than not.
I thought phallic (fálico) meant flawed (falho) and used it so much. I cringe when I remember this 😭
Local news anchor once ended a segment saying something was “a phallus” instead of a “fallacy. Understandably but hilarious.
Hey go easy on yourself, we’re all phallic.
