Confusing Words Explained

[ajqtrz]

This thread is about meaning. Some words sound and are spelled a lot alike and we can easily get confused and use the wrong one. When we do that we risk sounding a bit "odd" or worse, and that usually translates into not being as influential as we might like to be. So here's my entry into the list of confusing words AND which to use, where.

Then/Than.

When we speak we often even pronounce them the same! "Then" is linear in that it orders things for us. One thing follows another, logically, in time, place or sequentially. "I went to the doctor, then I went to the store." Going to the store comes after, in time, going to the doctor. So, if one thing follows another it's "then". It's "than" when one thing is compared to another and usually, implying or stating one is better than the other. "I would rather go to the doctor, than the store." The doctor is the preferred choice or option of the two being compared. "If like strawberries more than lemons." Strawberries are preferred.

So, in short: "Than" is comparing things and "Then" is ordering things."

That's my entry, what's yours?

 

[BrinDarby]

ask & axe .....

Ask : (v) action word .... I ask'd her, if the playground is safe.
Axe: (n) thing .................... I need an axe to chop down this tree.

 

[mucksterme]

I'll skip some of the more obvious ones and go to one I've been seeing a lot lately.
( btw " a lot " not " alot " )
The word is DOES. " AJ does post a lot" NOT dose. "AJ got a dose of hepatitis when he picked those soggy shorts up off the floor"

 

[hvariidh gwendrot]

marshmellow i love seeing that one )

 

[Player9999]

"Marshmellow" is upper case, as a disguise performer's professional name.

While costumed as a Valorian Champion, he axed the predator, to keep the playground safe, after asking regulars to make sure he'd axe the right one.

If This, Then That, or IFTTT, helped automate play of Elvenar based on a sequence of trigger cues.

Marindor ran off and got married, and then some fill-in staff pushed out release notes with more failed attempts at emotive subterfuge than clear technical writing.

Many lost Shamanic tribal languages, as well as current Afrikaans dialects, have fewer than 10,000 total words and avoid complex grammatic forms, or ability to express passive future actions directly. Growth of English language such that OED in its 3rd Edition has gone online only, with quarterly updates, reflects the nature of language to have more words, changing more rapidly, than their former 23 paper volumes could store in their ontology. A truly cunning linguist might handle proper pronunciations for the full content of Ullman's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry, that few buyers opt to get as four cartons weighing 140 pounds.

I expected based on this thread's title, that it'd cover words like "produce" versus "gain", or "and" and "or" relevant to Elvenar, or their inconsistent usage in events over time as staff change. With hints that a new feature will be "Guild Perks", one may wonder if staff formerly working for a large auto parts chain and then hired for Forge of Empires, was transferred to the Elvenar product, and lost track of base terms? At least those latter conditionals could be clearer if expressed as standard Booleans, including XOR.

What percentage of English words have forms as all of a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb?

 

[Player9999]

If anyone here has strong Deutch linguistic knowledge, and as schadenfreude has migrated to English, is there any current German term to express its complement of compersion?

How might those who play into the trap of mistranslation block fake Einstein quotes, or misrepresentation of Heisenberg's most cited theorum as "uncertainty", when it allows for high certainty, but indeterminancy of certain criteria simultaneously?

What is a "person", given lawyer games over corporations, or legal fictions with official immunity overlapping natural persons paradoxically treated as if the same and different simultaneously?

 

[ajqtrz]

What is a "person", given lawyer games over corporations, or legal fictions with official immunity overlapping natural persons paradoxically treated as if the same and different simultaneously?

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. Does the government have a will? Yes. Does it represent and match completely the will of a single organic person? No. Thus, governments, as well as corporations are seen as independent wills and since wills can only reside in self directed agents, both governments and corporations have been granted the status of "person."

Now how do you like them apples? (Sorry I got off track. )

AJ

 

[Iyapo1]

Your(you're) all correct. Alot(a lot) of those errors are on me. I know these are wrong but they slip through my filter, I am a lousy editor!
I also abuse commas almost devoutly and never space my ... properly. I am a mobile only player, my edits usually involve removing the dozens of Cs that I am forever hiting instead of the space bar.

Good enough! I also try to remove extra commas, I put them everywhere!

 

[Darielle]

My biggest pet peeve is when someone says, "I went to see my friends because their isn't any thing to do here. So I went over to there house and there over their just sitting and playing on there video games, so I joined them at there games. Then there like, "Let's go somewhere else," so then we went to there other friends' house."

 

[Darielle]

I also detest when someone says "I have to loose some weight." It always makes me think of using an axe and chopping the supports holding a huge bell at the top of a tower, and watching it drop and clang in my ears. Don't ask me why, but that's the image I always get.

 

[Iyapo1]

I also detest when someone says "I have to loose some weight." It always makes me think of using an axe and chopping the supports holding a huge bell at the top of a tower, and watching it drop and clang in my ears. Don't ask me why, but that's the image I always get.

Rofl +++. Now I am going to have to use that on you in another thread, (second stupid edit but I love commas first edit had ...) I might find a funny context that fits the image.

 

[Moho]

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:

 

[ajqtrz]

Their/There/They're

Their is about an agent. The agent "owns" or possess something. It is used to designate that some thing belongs to somebody, whether that thing is an actual object, idea or anything else. It's "their object," "their responsibility," etc.

There is about location. The location might be actual as in "over there," or metaphorical as in, "there is humor in his words." The first is refers to a physical location, the second to the condition of the humor. The second can be thought of as "the presence of humor is in the words." In both cause something is present in some way.

They're is a contraction of "They are" and assigns a characteristic to a group. "They're ready" means the condition assigned to the "they" is "ready." The key is to understand the "are" is part of the usage and thus, since "are" is a passive verb, it assigns something to the noun as a characteristic rather than a possession (which would be "their") or a presence/location within (as in "there").

So. "They're promoting their product over there." Which means "They're" doing something -- "promoting," -- about a product that belongs to them ("their product") at a location "over there."

AJ

 

[Player9999]

I also detest when someone says "I have to loose some weight." It always makes me think of using an axe and chopping the supports holding a huge bell at the top of a tower, and watching it drop and clang in my ears. Don't ask me why, but that's the image I always get.

Could we recruit you to loose some weights in Kolkata and Sector V of New Delphi, or similar places where "JimBrowning" and cohorts have dox'd robocaller scammer boilerrooms? Bells, used cars, cement mixers, construction debris, lift-slab building collapse.... Whatever does the job. (I'm now validated into a private server based effort to globally take down such scammers.)

If you went over there and crushed the roofs of buildings where such criminals ran their scams, millions would appreciate the public service.

Someone who doesn't know such basic pronouns likely would not be a friend I'd be so concerned about, whereas friends might recognize issues of calling unsecure networks or buildings emotional names like insecure, or pique others' curiosity with stories of peaks visited in mountain travels. OTOH, multitasking, I rarely find someone who doesn't at least rarely type a wrong word variant, only to say "bad fingers!" more harshly than another reader could.

What happens to the very idea of pronouns though, when gender bias issues get pushed through misuse of plurals for singulars, into a weird range of personal terms that are so disjointed, their use may end up dehumanizing people into database records of confused meanings in a failed effort to reduce historic biases over sexualities and genders? It's been rolled back in the now current 6th Edition, but the American Nutcase Shrink's APA style guide 5th Edition perpetrated a major fraud on universities and journals and societal victims of both, mandating misuse of gender to mean biological sex, due to neurotic prejudices of members with toxic waste sheepskins and medical licenses.

I'm actually an advocate for related rights, but many supposed fixes we're seeing are far more harmful than real or pretend problems.

 

[Player9999]

Their/There/They're

So. "They're promoting their product over there." Which means "They're" doing something -- "promoting," -- about a product that belongs to them ("their product") at a location "over there."

AJ

Do that many people online really not no such basic words?

How about further and farther, where in some cases both may be correct but carry different meanings, time or progression versus distance, but in other cases can be wrong when reversed?

There was a German magazine ad some years ago with a rear view image of two young kids sitting naked on an auditorium balcony, with a caption that translates as "A Little Nude Music", one letter off (in German) from the classical symphony loosely translated as "A Little Night Music". It requires a society that expects a certain base literacy level, as well as cultural tolerance for naturism and au naturel arts and lifestyles, for that to communicate an intended message too few US-ians would likely grok. Here, we'd probably get some hate cult factions making false allegations of child porn.

BTW, catch the "no" for "know" above?

 

[Player9999]

Sometimes I find it more annoying when otherwise smart people say dumb things.

Tim Dodd who produces space science and tech content as the "Everyday Astronaut" utterly mangles "butadiene" repeatedly, discussing Hydroxyl Terminated Polybutadiene (HTPB) and Polybutadiene Acrylonitrile (PBAN) in his million views video comparing pollution from different rocket fuels, and against jumbo jet performance. He interviews people and has research associates who he could have asked for help, unlike many others.

A fellow Elvenar AM who's well known here mangles or acts phobic about basic building blocks of life, like Amino Acids or NeuroPeptides, despite growing up with a Chemistry Professor father with searchable journal cites long after retirement. Admittedly it was hard to memorize every known 3 or 4 letter standard abbreviation for those when I took premed biochem at age 16. It's not like she didn't teach science courses to grad students herself years ago, either.

That can even impact music or humor, as well as political parody, say when some people are scared to pronounce drug names, even if designed to be easy to do for most who pay attention, say to:

Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin

or 5-ten-butyl-4-isopropyl-2,3-dimethylnonane Cytifusical panacea from SGK

In that case the musicians are UK doctors Adam Kay & Suman Biswah, aka "The Amateur Transplants". The melody should be quite familiar, and a favorite of chimney sweeps? IRL, my mother helped precursor mega-pharma SKF sell amphetamines doing corporate HQ market research before I was born, to help pay my father's tuition to grad school for his doctorate.

 

[Darielle]

I wish there were like buttons in here, lol.

 

[ajqtrz]

Do that many people online really not no such basic words?

.......

BTW, catch the "no" for "know" above?

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

 

[BrinDarby]

@ajqtrz ,
and why doesn't the credibility problem exsist for, ohhhh...
News presenters , or Corporations and thier Tag lines ??

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 injured man was taken to hospital" , "Do, the Dew" , TheHomeDepot

can you really blame as many ppl , if thats what they get exposed to ??

The most improperly used words, and under reported are "absolutes".
ie- always , never, everyone, noone, ect ect ect

 

[mucksterme]

I seen that

ugh

IT'S SEE NOT SEEN