'Then' and 'Than'. Two different words.

Liberal:

Yeah, because the grammatically correct phrase is “ain’t I”. Everyone ought to know that!

“Doug and John’s Liquor’s and Bar” - Rotating sign I have to see every day on my way to the office.

I hope it blows over in the next storm. Than what will they do? If there sign falls down, their screwed. I can’t over exagerate, I have millions of these example’s.

Your listening, right?

Of course my listening. I’ve got nothing to loose. :smiley:

Phase and faze. I’ve posted this one before. I’ve seen many erudite posters here use phase where faze is what they mean. I had an English teacher friend nearly get mad at me once for pointing out the error; she didn’t quite believe faze was actually a word.

“It didn’t phase him” to me parses as “it failed to shoot him with one of those guns from Star Trek.” It’s the wrong word, dammit!

Fortunately this isn’t nearly as common as then vs. than or there vs. their.

Here are a few that I’ve seen used incorrectly …

affect - effect
cite - site
(our favorite)
alternate - alternative
elicit - illicit
ensure - insure
who’s - whose

… and a couple that I screw up occasionally …
flaunt - flout
stationary - stationery

Huh. Never thought of that one as being bad. What would you prefer that people say? “Isn’t I?” “Amn’t I?” Or do they have to say “Am I not?”

Is this the thread ware someone can esplain “Lie” & “Lay” too me? My HS teachers always avoided that lessen.

It is not wrong to use “insure” to mean “ensure.” They’re interchangeable, unless there is an insurance company involved.

I won’t quibble chula. Probably one of the dictionary definitions would support you.* I was taught that ensure meant “to make certain”, and insure meant “to protect against loss”.

*[sub]And sure enough, the second definition of “insure” in my Funk and Wagnalls desktop dictionary is “to ensure”.[/sub] :rolleyes:

If I may piggyback a growing peeve of the petting variety onto this fine thread…

The letter Q is to be followed by the letter U. Always. At all times.

When in English.

Alas, not all names and words are in English. Arabic, for instance, is a language.

Quick social studies lesson, people: We are at war in Iraq. We are there to free the Iraqis from the horrible oppression of Al Qaida. Not Al Quaida. Not Iraqu, Iraque, Irak, Irack, or the tortured Irackwue. Let’s not even touch on the inhabitants, the Iraquwee’s.

Sure. In order to lay a girl, you have to lie to her. :wink:

This whole thread embiggens my heart.

“lie” = “recline” or “intentionally speak falsehood” (intransitive verb)
Examples: The dog lies in its bed. Politicians lie about their intentions when running for office.

“lay” = “place” or “situate” (transitive verb)
Example: Lay your beach mat on the ground to provide a place to sit.

One reason for the confusion between the two words is that the past tense of “lie” is “lay” when the meaning is “rest” or “recline”, but the past tense of “lie” is “lied” when the meaning is “intentionally speak falsehood”. Because the same verb conjugates differently under different circumstances, the irregular form is sometimes incorrectly parsed as the transitive verb “lay”, and likewise the transitive verb “lay” is used inappropriately when the present tense “lie” is meant instead.

Affect and effect. :mad:

It’s embarassing how many “Oh!” moments I had reading through this site. Although I suppose it should be more embarassing to the Hawaii educational system. I swear I learned more about how English works when I was learning Latin in college than from the K-12 when I was learning English. I promise to do better.

Although my fingers also have a mind of their own. Almost like my mind is talking to them and they type what they hear. I’ll think down to them “They’re” and they’ll type “there.” They also seem to really like certain patterns and if given a few letters will head pell-mell down that path leading to an overused backspace on my keyboard. What’s up with that?

From 7th grade through 12th grade, I was given both a lit book and a grammar book. On the first day of each English class every teacher said, “Just leave your grammar book in your locker. We will never use it.”

And we never did. This seems to hold true for most people my age…

Am I being whooshed here, or are you perchance mistaking an accent mark for an apostrophe? It should be spelt with two accents, strictly speaking, thus: résumé.

It bugs the hell out of me to see people writing about “submitting a resume”. “Resume” is pronounced “ree-ZYOOM” and means “to start something again”. “Résumé” is pronounced “REH-zoo-may” and is what we Brits would describe as a CV (curriculum vitæ).

Murphy’s law of pointing out grammatical errors rears it’s ugly head…I think you meant sign. Unless perhaps it was waving in a particular manner? :dubious:

I suppose you’re one of those people who think “naive” should be spelled “naïve”.

Don’t get me wrong- I like diacretics. They have their uses, like indicating stress in Spanish, or differentiating letters in a phonetically-spelled English scheme. But in normal, everyday English writing, diacretics aren’t neccessary. “I sent my resume to Globotech Inc.” isn’t going to confuse anyone.

If “box” can mean both a container to hold stuff and to punch someone, I think we can get by with two meanings for “resume”.

Yes, but “box” and “box” are pronounced the same. To my eye, your sentence just trips me up because I mentally pronounce it wrongly “I sent my resume… huh? Oh, résumé…”

But then that may be because, being English, I don’t usually come across the word résumé. We say “CV” instead. I guess if I was more familiar with the usage then it would no longer trip me up. So that’s my argument dead in the water :rolleyes:

(I write “naive”, not “naïve”, by the way, seeing as there is no other word that can be confused with it :wink: )