Phase / faze = I went through a phase where egregious grammatical mistakes bugged the h3!! out of me. Now they don’t faze me.
Jive / jibe = The author’s use of jive in the otherwise scholarly article didn’t jibe with his claim of punctilious academic writing.
Holistic =/= homeopathy. My pet’s veterinarian incorporates holistic concepts in his practice, but draws the line at including junk sciences such as “homeopathy”.
Lay/lie = oh, what’s the use with trying to sort out this pair? It’s a lost cause.
Ah! Thanks for that! I always thought carom and careen were two versions of the same word (meaning “ricochet”). Thanks for the correction.
I can typically get this one right in writing when I have a second to think it through. But in speech, I probably pick the wrong one about half the time. I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent and articulate person, but lay/lie still trips me up sometimes.
Maybe this one isn’t common, but a dear friend of mine, who may be the smartest person I know, says “weary” when he should say “wary”. As in, “I am weary of the unintended consequences of that action.” I think he’s conflating “wary” and “leery” into one word. Dunno if others fall prey to the same thing.
Bit esoteric, but when software company Pixologic created their 3D rendering software, ZBrush, they needed a term for a new kind of pixel. A regular pixel has an X and Y coordinate, plus a color. Pixologic needed to store all that, plus a Z coordinate for depth. And so they invented:
The Pixol.
Say those two terms out loud a few times. Pixel. Pixol. Pixel. Pixol.
You fuckers couldn’t have come up with something just slightly more original than that?
One I got caught out with the other day: continuous, contiguous and continual. But in this case, even knowing the definitions it’s tricky to pick the right one in some situations.
And when people take “consciousness” in a philosophical debate to just mean alertness / activity i.e. the opposite of “unconscious”.
(I’m not sure if this counts, as it is one definition of consciousness, but it’s almost never the meaning intended in such debates).
IMHO, the auto-correcting of “its” to “it’s” is actually really convenient - it saves two keystrokes on a word that is in about every other sentence, as opposed to its (heh) much less common pronoun brother. You just need to make sure to “x” the suggestion when you really do want to spell “its”.