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    Your Elvenar Team

Confusing Words Explained

Iyapo1

Well-Known Member
So, yes, it does seem there are a lot of people unaware of misusing these words undermines their credibility.

I disagree. I dont expect grammar perfection on-line. Seeing a typo or auto correcter or a plane old mistake does not undermine the posters credibility with most people imo. Thus the forum rules about grammar nazis.


And yes, I know the plane needs to loose weight.
 

mucksterme

Oh Wise One
I disagree. I dont expect grammar perfection on-line. Seeing a typo or auto correcter or a plane old mistake does not undermine the posters credibility with most people imo. Thus the forum rules about grammar nazis.

* poster's or posters' :D

I do not believe in playing grammer nazi as a general rule.
When I see misused words in a discussion about the usefullness of Blossom Mages, I cringe but let it go.
However
I am often on Facebook, or in another discussion, and somebody is trying to argue about economics, or the US Constitution.
Well if that person obviously cannot pass an eighth grade English test, I tend to discount anything they have to say.
 

ajqtrz

Chef - loquacious Old Dog
I disagree. I dont expect grammar perfection on-line. Seeing a typo or auto correcter or a plane old mistake does not undermine the posters credibility with most people imo. Thus the forum rules about grammar nazis.

And yes, I know the plane needs to loose weight.

While you may believe the misuse of words doesn't reduce credibility there have been a number of studies that indicate otherwise. In one they replace just two words with their "incorrect" forms in a presentation and had multiple presenters before multiple audiences. Overall, the misuse of the words reduced the audiences positive response to the presentation by a small percent. So you may not believe it or you may not notice the small reduction in credibility as it isn't always measured, but it is there. Of course one might not expect "grammar perfection" and you might be able to tolerate it without noticing it at all. But, overall, like many things, a little improvement is a little improvement and makes us all a bit better at whatever we are doing. And that can't be a bad thing.

In fact, since you mentioned it, the habit of online posting -- with the more relaxed grammatical constructs -- I have to note that online posting, if done without a lot of regard to grammatical things, trains us to not hear the mistakes. When that happens, as has been shown over and over, the mistakes carry over into more formal presentations exactly because we are so used to them. It's sort of like I a person who uses blue language out of habit. He/she will not find it easy to rid themselves of the habit when needed. So why have the habit in the first place? I can't tell you how many times I received resumes from otherwise qualified graduates only to spot not just the occasional mistake, but a sort of "this is online so I don't have to be formal." I can't remember any time I got a resume like that that the person got the job, though sometimes they did get an interview. The thing is, good grammar isn't going to hurt you, but it teach your ear to hear bad grammar in you own communication. Nobody ever got fired from their job for being too formal in the correspondence and most companies want employees who know how to use formal English well. So why not just use it everywhere and skip all the shortcuts?

AJ
 
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BrinDarby

Well-Known Member
@ajqtrz ,
If someone make mistakes in the very post about making mistakes,
then how should that be look'd @ ?

( I just found it funny, not bust'n ur chops, heh heh )
 

Darielle

Chef, Scroll-Keeper, and Buddy Fan Club Member
Unfortunately, I've seen several instances where the poster has used "there" instead of "their" and "there" instead of "they're" and so on. So, yes, it does seem there are a lot of people unaware of misusing these words undermines their credibility. I thought it would be fun to have people put in their pet peeves and to explain for all of us the proper use of "such basic words."

And I did catch the "no" for "know" and cringed appropriately.

@Darielle As one who is guilty of sometimes confusing "loose" with "lose" I cringed when you mentioned the problem. I still have to stop and think about the correct spelling for each and sometimes I'm pretty sure I've gotten it wrong. Hopefully you've never run into my mistakes and ended up detesting my words.

AJ
I haven't noticed you do that, but I will be sure to point it out if I see it, lol (jk; sometimes my humor does not go over well.) Detest may be a strong word, but you can detest words or posts without detesting the people who say them, so it's all good. And even though I spent 30 years as an editor, I still find myself succumbing to "internet speak" lately. Seems like the more you see the wrong word, the more you unconsciously start to accept it. I have to catch myself, and wind up cringing too. So that's easier than we'd think.
 

ajqtrz

Chef - loquacious Old Dog
@ajqtrz ,
If someone make mistakes in the very post about making mistakes,
then how should that be look'd @ ?

( I just found it funny, not bust'n ur chops, heh heh )

Of course if one didn't make mistakes there would be no room for growth. I like growing as it helps me feel I'm making some kind of progress. I did find and correct a typo. That's not the real problem though. Typos shouldn't get through, but sometimes they do. What really shouldn't get through is the wrong word entirely. Know what you mean and make sure it's what you are saying.

What mistake did you see, btw? I really don't take offense at anyone pointing out my mistakes as they are numerous overall so it's usually really "low hanging fruit" as they say. I'm a bit like Benjamin Franklin in that the more I find I'm making mistakes, the more there is for me to do in life. ;) :D

AJ
 

Talaedraiia

Well-Known Member
Elvenar News offers a video, in which players can learn information about this year's Autumn Zodiac Event. As you reach minute 3:50 in the videow, the subtitles will spell the following: you can also feed your Red Panda Master and activate it's special effect.

Anyone can Google "it's" and see what it means:

View attachment 10472
In this case is it not being used as a possessive pronoun which would make it correct
 
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Talaedraiia

Well-Known Member
The only thing I really hate is when someone says something like “Me and Jim went to the park yesterday.” It seems to me that everyone is doing this now and no one seems to know that is incorrect.
 

mucksterme

Oh Wise One
The only thing I really hate is when someone says something like “Me and Jim went to the park yesterday.” It seems to me that everyone is doing this now and no one seems to know that is incorrect.

A couple years ago I was looking at a school's website.
They had pictures of all the teachers,
One caught my eye because it was a picture of a couple on a beach.
The caption said, "Me and my husband on our honeymoon."
I groaned a bit inside and thought, "On a school's website?"
Then under the caption I saw, " Mrs Smith, 11th Grade English"
 

Moho

Chef
In this case is it not being used as a possessive pronoun which would make it correct
Yes, but the wrong spelling of the possesive pronoun has become so widespread that people can no longer differentiate between the correct form and the wrong one.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Here's another common error: This is a special occasion for my other half and I.
ETA: Which I suspect is a case of hyper correctness caused by efforts to rectify the tendency to make the mistake mentioned in mucksterme's post.
 
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ajqtrz

Chef - loquacious Old Dog
you edited "not" to "note" in the 1st one, the other one
its "too" not "to" .....

again I got a laugh, wasn't bust'n ur chops

You got me, though, I have to confess, the "to" instead of "too" was not an error in logic, but in typing, and that is something of which I am prone. (Darn fingers!). I did catch the first on a reread, but not the second.

Here's another common error: This is a special occasion for my other half and I.

What's the correct form and the mistake being made here? Just so people see it -- if you took out "my other half and" you would have "This is a special ocassion for I," which grates on you ear and warns you of a problem. It, of course, should be "this is a special occasion for me." The easiest way to correct the "I or me?" question is to reduce the sentence to just the I or me part. So Jane and I went to the store becomes "I went to the store," which sounds fine, while "Jane and me went to the the store" becomes "me went to the store," which sounds awful. That's my method of making sure I get it right.

AJ

Thanks,

AJ
 
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Player9999

Member
I find it rather scary when I read a sentence like this, and understand it! Of course, I did have to read it twice. I will say that.

Ultimately "person" is will. Anything or anyone that has a will able to present itself before the courts as having the right to be there, is a "person." A corporation is a "congregate of will" but not the identity of a single organic entity. Since the will of a corporation has an interest in the case as a representative of the collected will of it's stockholders rather than a particular organic entity, the courts have deemed it to be a separate entity. One could ask the same question of governments in particular.

The notion of what a "person" versus "natural born person" are in US jurisprudence is a bastardized mess from corrupt SCOTUS and other courts.

I find "Hobby Lobby" or some of the church "personhood" cases absurd. That might get cleaned up a bit if we could establish that a "legal person" institution or official figure has no civil rights and is subject to instant RTKBA penalties or zeroing of financial values (eg, stocks, access to banking) when justified, whereas only a natural person, eg a 14th Am one "born or naturalized", exists entitled to "equal protections of law". With corrupt police or legislators, a good test for that might be that one is NOT the latter, if they claim sovereign or official immunity.

Philosophical notions of personhood can be wildly esoteric, whereas in theory domestic and international law need uniform definitions and standards to be functional.

I've researched and spoken on the details of how SCOTUS conflated legal virtual and natural "personhood", which it turns out is a bit more malfeasant and complicated than just a court error in a case "Reporter". That's a bit complex history for a terse description, even for people well versed in related context and process and standards.
 

Player9999

Member
@ajqtrz ,

The english language is already being mangled in society,
isnt it ??? while yes less educated ppl make these mistakes
more often, a vast number are nothing more than typos
that weren't caught in time.....

The most improperly used words, and under reported are "absolutes".
ie- always , never, everyone, noone, ect ect ect
The false depictions as if absolutes for things that are not, may moreso reflect a society that values lawyer and marketing notions like "puffery" as if other than fraud, plus people never trained to think critically (in terms of logic and standards, not "woke" BS now infesting so-called universities).

In some cases, language is mangled in fundamentally unsupported ways due to mere serial sloppiness. Use of "unique" as a comparative may be the leading example of that, where by its own etymology, it has to reflect a singular exclusive thing or condition.

Now, if we required enough Latin to grok et cetera, est id, etc., or German to get schadenfreude, uncertainty vs indeterminancy, etc, and Mandarin just because of China's industrial posture never mind geopolitics, we'd have to deal with a complementary issue of most humans never qualifying as competent adults. Plus, Hindi and Gujarti to make off color slurs at criminal scammer robocallers? What's that metaphor about a dog wearing boots as your mother and sister?
 

Player9999

Member
I haven't noticed you do that, but I will be sure to point it out if I see it, lol (jk; sometimes my humor does not go over well.) Detest may be a strong word, but you can detest words or posts without detesting the people who say them, so it's all good. And even though I spent 30 years as an editor, I still find myself succumbing to "internet speak" lately. Seems like the more you see the wrong word, the more you unconsciously start to accept it. I have to catch myself, and wind up cringing too. So that's easier than we'd think.
As a society, how can we possibly deal well with the pace of information overload in our lives, and where I'd need a staff of 30 researchers and editors and archivists to better keep up with just my own flow, but also the ability for them to do month or year long projects in minutes to hours?

I too find myself to be the primary obstacle, trying to accept an unacceptable error or mangling of ideas level, in order to barely keep up.

When I was a kid, I recall mentions of 300k English words. Now, better general purpose dictionaries claim 1.6 million, not including all those field specific references where I sense some schools sell PhD's in 16 different fields for what I'd consider basics for any single adult.

How many non-Brits not associated with university subscriptions have OED v 3 access (which I jumped hoops to get w/o paying $300/year), never mind copies of OED 2Edv4 as searchable data, and Merriam Webster's Unabridged plus more timely updated Collegiate? And then Libgen subscriber access, as the world's largest library, or the Carl Malamud fronted project to flout abuse of IP laws and make public access to legally incorporated standards, before courts eventually caught up and said Congress and corporate groups were wrong about that law?

Still, I see a core difference between discerning intellectual and engagement level based on writing, versus being a grammar Nazi just to act OCD-ish, or conversely as a form of humor. One of those three seems at odds with the time pressures to move forward, that have to compromise writing ethics suitable for ships carrying letters across oceans about 2 cycles a year.
 

Player9999

Member
The lounge never had them, I don't think. (Personally, I find that silly, but oh well.)
Pretty sure you're correct about that.

As a user who episodically pays attention to or ignores forums, my default isn't to pay attention to such quirky differences among functions in different parts of "the US forums", as if all the same entity from a casual user POV.
 
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