I don’t know whether this site affects me or effects me, but I’m sure I can go not only farther but further reading it.
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What happened to Bad Astronomy???
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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Death from the Skies!
Order a copy of Death from the Skies! from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Borders.
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?"
-- Adam Savage, Mythbusters"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating."
-- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising -
People who like me!
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DISCOVERmagazine.com: Latest Articles on Space - DISCOVER Blogs: The Loom
August 29th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
Does this help us in South Africa and the Iraq?
August 29th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
Was it just me or was the advertising along the side of the page that phil linkd to for a pornographic website?
I have the same problem with my own website. Advertising for religious groups etc.
Bummer eh?
August 29th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Thank GOD…I was just posting this long screed on a radio board and I had to argue with myself for five minutes whether or not to use “affect” or “effect”. I used “affect”, and was correct to do so. Thanks for the confirm, Phil.
BTW, when I went to the site, the ad was for real estate. Sure, you could produce porn in the homes they have for sale, but it didn’t say as much in the ad.
August 29th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
A.J.: I don’t think they stay the same, I got a Healthy Choice ad.
Sheesh, if only we still used Latin. It seems to make more sense to me than English.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:42 am
I’ve just learned that on a Firefly episode, Zoe was mistaken when she said that “sanguine” also meant bloody.
August 30th, 2007 at 1:11 am
I learned a few things from that - which surprised me, as I’m known as a “grammar Nazi” at work and I’m always correcting people. They omitted my pet hate, though: “lose” vs. “loose”.
August 30th, 2007 at 1:12 am
A.J.: I got a Days Inn advertisement.
I wonder if Phil’s stumbling upon this web site has anything to do with his second book.
There should be entries for “fewer” versus “less” and “quickly” versus “fast” and “than” versus “then” and “perverted” versus “perverse”.
Phil once used “then” instead of “than” in one of his postings. I attribute that to his spending too much time on digg
August 30th, 2007 at 1:35 am
Tim G says: “There should be entries for “fewer†versus “less†and “quickly†versus “fast†and “than†versus “then†and “perverted†versus “perverseâ€.
Try “Sleeping Dongs Don’t Lay (and that’s no lie)” by Richard Lederer. It’s got all of those and hundreds more. My copy is never far from my keyboard.
- Jack
August 30th, 2007 at 2:24 am
No entry for “good” vs. “well”, either…
“How are you?”
“I’m good”
AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGH!
August 30th, 2007 at 2:56 am
Also check out this site from Dr. Paul Brians, professor of English at Washington State University, called “Common Error In English”:
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/index.html
August 30th, 2007 at 3:11 am
A couple of my pet peeves are:
Quite vs quiet
Temblor vs tremblor
And of course, Impacted vs affected
Impacted should only be used in reference to wisdom teeth and bowel movements.
August 30th, 2007 at 3:12 am
For more in-depth coverage of this sort of thing, plus much more, check out the admittedly more abstruse LanguageLog at:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/
Remember you’ve been warned!
A concerned citizen
August 30th, 2007 at 4:51 am
I believe they are wrong about “staunch” and “stanch”, at least as far as UK English is concerned. The word “staunch” is the only form I know of here.
August 30th, 2007 at 6:08 am
I can proudly report that I’ve *never* been confused about whether Abjure or Adjure is the correct word for the occasion. Irony gland alert: if this page covers “commonly confused words”, then why do the first two on the list “have little in common other than their rarity…”?
August 30th, 2007 at 7:10 am
They’re slightly wrong on “past”, which originated as a variant spelling of “passed”, and continued to be acceptable as such until quite recently (as “spelt” still is). And they miss another meaning of “affect”, “to adopt a (usually) false seeming”, as in “affect a pleasant smile”.
“Sanguine” does ultimately mean “bloody”, but in modern English it is normally limited to the developed sense, “with the arteries full of blood, therefore ready for action, therefore optimistic”, going back to the ancient theory of the Four Humors (blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile) and the Four Temperaments (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholy).
August 30th, 2007 at 7:20 am
Strait and straight. As in ’strait-laced’, ’strait and narrow’, etc.
Reign and rein. ‘Free rein’, not ‘free reign’.
Tow and toe. ‘Toe the line’, not ‘tow the line’.
I know *you* all knew that, but for completeness’ sake…
August 30th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Not sure I would pay a whole lot of attention to that site.
TS Frost: from Merriam-Webster: sanguine: consisting of or relating to blood b: bloodthirsty, sanguinary (All the way down to the 4th def is “confident, optimistic”.
I stand by Zoe.
Others have been mentioned as well.
My favourite - and VERY well researched - reference has always been http://takeourword.com/ - these guys are great. For some details on “sanguine” as noted above, go to http://www.takeourword.com/arc_logi.html and search for sanguine - or jump to “bloody”
JC
August 30th, 2007 at 7:32 am
However - they DO have my personal favourite - Anxious and Eager. And they are correct about it. Credit where it is due.
JC
August 30th, 2007 at 7:43 am
Now explain flammable and inflammable.
Please?
August 30th, 2007 at 8:14 am
My personal issue (particularly when speaking) is normally with adopt/adapt - which they miss out entirely. I’m with Sprocket on Stanch vs Staunch: I have never come across the verb ‘to stanch’, always ‘to staunch’.
August 30th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Her our are moist frequentist confounded wordiness eye sea:
unionized and/oar unionized.
John
August 30th, 2007 at 8:22 am
My pet peeve: in English it is perfectly acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition. The idea that it is not is a myth based on a grammar book written by a minister (!) in the 1800s who thought English should be like Latin (which does have such a rule).
August 30th, 2007 at 8:43 am
I think they’re wrong about “lightening”, when they say that it refers to something illuminating or brightening. I have heard the word “enlightening” or “enlightened” used in that way, but not lightening. I would define “lightening” as “reducing the weight of…”
August 30th, 2007 at 8:45 am
By the way, it was Winston Churchill (I think, I need to fact check that) who said: “Putting a preposition at the end of a sentence is something up with which we cannot put”.
August 30th, 2007 at 8:50 am
AK,
While “in-” at the start of a word often means “not,” in the case of inflammable, it has to do with the Latin root, inflammo (-are), where “in-” means more like “into.”
The word “flammable” never really existed until people realized that “inflammable” might be mistaken to mean “not ‘flammable.’”
August 30th, 2007 at 8:52 am
One more site I really love. It gives the derivation of many commonly used phrases. Ever want to know where the phrase “Too many to shake a stick at” came from. It’s here:
http://www.word-detective.com/
August 30th, 2007 at 8:54 am
I believe they are wrong about “staunch†and “stanchâ€, at least as far as UK English is concerned. The word “staunch†is the only form I know of here.
They are correct according to my Oxford English Dictionary.
August 30th, 2007 at 9:01 am
I have to disagree with all the “stanch/staunch” dissenters on here. I’ve run into “stanch” much more often when referring to stopping bloodflow.
I’ve known almost all of these since I was in eighth grade, anyway, because I’ve always been super special. (Actually it was because I ran into a weird kind of grammar craze.)
August 30th, 2007 at 9:04 am
My pet peeve is the ever-growing confusion over “your”, “you’re” and “yore” that seems to be taking over the internet. It’s the same general confusion that writers often have with “there”, “their”, and “they’re”.
A few years ago, my local paper (Ottawa Citizen) ran a 1/4 page ad from a real estate company. The large headline of the ad read:
“This year, 25% of newly-married couples will buy there first home”
So I called the paper to complain because I think it is not reasonable that an upstanding newspaper should be promoting illiteracy. I had to escalate the call twice before I could get somone to acknowledge that there was, in fact, a grammatical error in the copy.
Finally, I called the realtor and complained that their advertisement made them look like dorks, and it was corrected the next day.
August 30th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Yes, I see the missing “e” in someone, but the “e” key is sticky on this keyboard and I saw the error after I hit submit. I’m in a government office. Civil servants don’t need the letter “e” anyway. Cutbacks, you know…
August 30th, 2007 at 10:03 am
@Cameron and A.J.
Yes the ads are for sure changing and to a certain extent individual.
As I am from Germany, some of the ads I see are in German.
Intresting post.
Andre
August 30th, 2007 at 10:06 am
@Evolving Squid:
You know they have to save the money that is wasted by government servants surfing in the internet during their work time;-)
Andre
August 30th, 2007 at 11:50 am
I am ashamed to say, I had to read it about 6 times before I saw it.
There, that will teach me.
JC
August 30th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Following up on my previous post, I should say that “stanch” is correct, according to my OED, for Americans. “Staunch” is the more usual British usage.
I grew up near the US border, so it was always “stanch” for me. In general, Canadians can probably go either way with that one. Whichever way a Canadian chooses, they should learn how to do it to bleeding because if you are losing blood and can’t sta(u)nch the bleeding, you’ll probably die waiting for health care
August 30th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
My pet peeve … regardless and irrespective. Worse, because I’m certain that an ill-founded blending of the two gave us “irregardless”, which makes my hair stand on end.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Oops, belatedly I realize ‘regardless’ and ‘irrespective’ mean essentially the same thing, not different things, so they wouldn’t appear in this list, now would they?
Still my #1 pet peeve, however …
August 30th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
A couple more they missed; at least I think they qualify:
Capital and Capitol
Principal and Principle
August 30th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Oh, and another pair I’ve seen confused lately: Breathe and Breath.
August 30th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
They did nauseous/nauseated/nauseating, but not noxious.
Dennis Zaebst said:
> By the way, it was Winston Churchill (I think, I need to fact check that) who said: “Putting a preposition at the end of a sentence is something up with which we cannot putâ€.
Uh, you’ve got it all wrong.
1. The phrase was in response to someone “correcting” his writing by eliminating a preposition at the end of a sentence. The response was to show the stiltedness and therefore ridiculousness of the change. Your version might be intended as ironic, but suggests enforcing the stilted rule.
2. The actual phrase is debated, with several variations, but likely is
“This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.â€
3. It seems there’s no cite to Churchill, and some evidence it predated him.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html
August 30th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Shouldn’t you be spending your time more productively? profanity? proclivity? proactive? inactive? inarticulately? particularly? superunificationly?
August 30th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
My high school principal made a school-wide announcement one day that we now had refuge containers outside the school. Although I would never refuse the increased safety these brought, I would rather have had refuse containers.
August 30th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
One more good website: http://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm
August 30th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
I dont need no fancy talkin web site like dis…I speaks real good english. Just ax me.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
FTA: Anxious means “troubled” or “worried.” Eager means “having keen interest” or “impatient expectancy.” When anxious is used to describe someone’s expectancy, it is often incorrectly used to mean “eager,” which has a far more positive connotation. One may be anxious about an impending report card, but one would be eager to go on a long-awaited vacation.
This. This x 100! Everyone I know (being from the upper Midwest, specifically Fargo, ND) uses “anxious” to mean eager. Drives me nuts — “anxious” is such a good word to use for something that causes anxiety. I am literally the only person I know who ever considers “anxious” to mean a negative when someone uses it.
August 31st, 2007 at 12:24 am
Well, you don’t know me, Ryan, but I also understand the difference between ‘anxious’ and ‘eager’. The misuse of ‘anxious’ drives me nuts, too!
August 31st, 2007 at 8:25 am
I can’t believe “upload” and “download” didn’t make the list.
August 31st, 2007 at 8:46 am
I used to teach basic computer skills (including word processing), and I always got my students to type the following sentence into their w.p. and then run it through the spell checker (try it yourself):
“Putt know yaw trussed inn spell chequers”
Now say it aloud!
August 31st, 2007 at 8:48 am
Slight mistake - I meant this obviously:
“Putt knot yaw trussed inn spell chequers”
Damn spell checker didn’t spot that either!
August 31st, 2007 at 9:30 am
My inner grammar geek is crying. They forgot raise/rise. Also their/there/they’re.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:02 am
@ Irishman:
Re: Winston Churchill on prepositions: Well, at least there is evidence that the anecdote might have been inappropriately attributed to him :>)
I just stuck that comment in as an afterthought as a bit of humor (at least it’s funny if you haven’t heard it a hundred times).
Thanks for the link…very interesting. I’m always ready to be proven wrong.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:17 am
beavis and butthead voice, “cool”.
August 31st, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Ignorance and Apathy
I don’t know and I don’t care.
August 31st, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Elwood
Sounds like someone else here has brushed up on their Anguish Languish: http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/anguish.html
“Murder, mare argo art toe swarm?”
“Yap, mar doling dodder, Hank yore clues honor higglery larme, An dun gore norther warder!”
JC
September 5th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
1. “Although aggravate has been used in this manner for four hundred years, considerable controversy over this use exists today.” Hahaha! Typically, when something has been used for four centuries, it’s considered proper.
); where I’m from, it’s a derivitave of [the spoken-only word] “niggro” which is a local/mis-pronuciation of “negro” which means “black”, and is synonymous with all of the above. It is often used offensively, but not because the word is offensive, but because it is used to describe colored people, who are considered inferior by those who use the word offensively. The same person using any other word to describe those same people would be using said other word just as offensively, negating the entire purpose of considering it offensive.
2. I understand the difference between anxious and eager, but I would tend to be anxious about a vacation and eager about a report card. Just me.
3. I didn’t know “chaff” meant anything other than “metallic confetti to keep radar-guided missiles from hitting you”. Interesting. (A few other words I hadn’t seen before too.)
4. What is “getting one’s just deserts” then? Am I getting my own abandonment?
5. According to wordnet.princeton.edu, “Enourmousness” means “unusual largeness”, while “enormity” means “largeness”. I’d never heard the former, and that’s exactly how I use the latter.
6. I don’t see the difference in their definitions of “fortuitous” and “fortunate”; both are “happening by chance”. I think the difference is that “fortuitous” means “I didn’t plan this” while “fortunate” means “I didn’t plan this, but I’m glad it happened”.
7. @Dennis Zaebst: “Lightening” means “making something lighter” whether “lighter” refers to the electromagnetic spectrum or weight. Usually you see “brighter” rather than “lighter” for colors, but both are used and correct.
8. I still think the word “n***er” is funny (how do you pronounce that–nasterisker?
9. “Sanguine” most definately refers to blood in many contexts (role-playing games come to mind), but is much more often used to mean “like blood” (especially “blood-red”) than actually “of blood”. Princeton agrees with the blood-colored definition.