I’m at a science conference.
If I had a dollar for every time someone confused (in speaking or listening) hypo and hyper, I’d have…quite a lot of dollars.
Likewise inter and intra. Who came up with this shit?
Others? (focus on confusing terms, not stuff that’s hard to spell, say)
flammable and inflammable
In the case of hypo- and hyper-, the ancient Greeks. In the case of inter- and intra-, the Romans.
Um, they’re pronounced differently, or is that just a British thing?
Areally you old enough to remember extended and expanded memory? I never could get that straight
Sometimes? It’s pretty bad most of the time.
I’ve heard that in Spanish, *the words are actually spelled how they sound. *
Effect/Affect – far too many people think they’re intrachangable.
My first thought on reading “science conference” is that the challenge is hearing one of these prefixes spoken by a non-native speaker without having heard their version of the prefix before.
“Unique” in place of “interesting” and “literally” for “figuratively”.
Literally in place of figuratively *literally *makes me want to slap the speaker. Whenever I find myself using “literally” (which isn’t often) I always add “and yes, I do mean literally; I know how to use it properly”
I’m a Brit, and the conference is in the US.
IME the difference for both British and American English is quite subtle, and people from both countries sometimes resort to hyperstressing the difference (hy-PO-fractionation).
When did “ironically” become a synonym for “coincidentally” ?
As a Canadian you should know: Alanis Morissette.
No, Bill. It’s You Ought To Know.
Very true. I have never heard anyone ask, “How do you spell your name?”
You heard right, hermano.
Using I instead of me as an object pronoun.
+1
then you’re literally gonna hate this
According to the dictionary, “literally” now also means “figuratively”
Sometimes?
Language is so incredibly imprecise, malleable, context dependent and the words mean entirely different things (often subtly) from one person to the next. You can’t precisely translate a lot of words from one language to the next because they’re not the same word or concept, even using a damned thesaurus to find the nearest equivalent. You can only do approximates, which bork people over because they expect the translated word to mean what they think it should mean.