confident = very sure of something
confidant = someone in whom one confides (in fact, used to be spelled “confident” just like in French)
It can mean more than one layer. The use of a hyphen for clarity is recommended. Also the layers are not hens.
lucubrate: to study late into the night
lubricate: to make something slippery
anomie: lack of laws and standards
anomia: the inability to remember names
anæmia: reduced capacity of the blood to transport oxygen
stator: the stationary part of a motor
stater: one who states
Bizarre: weird, strange.
Bazaar: A marketplace
Flak: anti-aircraft fire or severe criticism. From a German acronym of Flugzeugabwehrkanone (“airplane defense cannon”); hence, flak jacket, flak tower, etc.
Flack: a press agent or publicity agent. Possibly derived from the name of Gene Flack, a onetime advertising executive.
I recently read an article on 538 saying Dianne Feinstein is receiving a lot of “flack” for not resigning. Some dictionaries allow flack as an alternate spelling of flak but I think they should be spelled differently.
New word! Thanks.
That’s because the more common form, diabetes mellitus, is shortened to just diabetes, but the word simply means “siphon” in Greek, and “mellitus” is the relevant term-- it means “sweet.” When you have diabetes mellitus, your body dumps, or “siphons” sugar into your urine.
“Insipidus” means “tasteless,” and I don’t want to know he details, but people whose urine has a very high water content (and they are thirsty a lot, and have to pee a lot) have diabetes insipidus. Their urine is mostly plain water. It can be caused by kidney disease, but also be pituitary dysfunction, because there actually is a hormone that tells your body how much urine to make.
It’s kinda like how anorexia almost always refers to anorexia nervosa, or appetite loss due to a nervous condition. There are lots of other types of anorexia. It can be caused by pregnancy, an auto-immune disorder, an infection or the side effect of a medication. It just means loss of appetite. Ironically, of all types of anorexia, people with anorexia nervosa are the only ones who actually experience hunger, they just refuse to eat.
Not really - I am on a medication that suppresses my appetite ( I am not taking it for that purpose) That doesn’t mean I am not hungry - I am hungry. I just have no desire to eat because without any appetite, I might as well be eating People Chow. So I end up forcing myself to eat a couple of times a day.
“Appetite” and “hunger” are not the same thing but they get confused.
Perennial - a plant that “comes back” every year
Perineal - the area between the genitals and the anus
I wouldn’t have thought these would be confused until I saw the following post on Reddit:
disillusion / dissolution
grisly / grizzly
taught / taut
phase / faze
populous / populace
rational / rationale
naval / navel
precede / proceed
bait / bate
farther / further
Raise: To lift, make higher. Or to construct, as in to raise a barn.
Raze: To demolish.
heroin: a drug
heroine: a female hero
lax - “not sufficiently strict, severe, or careful”
lackadaisical - “lacking enthusiasm and determination; carelessly lazy”
laxadaisical - not a word
I am amazed by the number of people who seem to think that “where” is the past tense of “to be”.
Nobody mentioned these?
Straight - Moving or extending in one direction, as a ‘straight line’
Strait - A narrow passage of water connecting two large bodies of water
Also:
Bow - Used to shoot arrows
Bough - A tree limb
Beau - A boy friend
Bo - Maybe the the Beau’s first name
Bow - the forward end of a vessel or airship
Bows - the exterior of the forward end of a vessel
To confuse this issue some more, we might bring up the slightly slangy term “LEDE,” pronounced like it looks, or /lid/ in IPA, which is used mostly by journalists to mean the opening paragraph or idea of a story. Off the top of my head, I think this is cognate with “lead” as in “lead-in” in the sense of starting a story, but they spell it LEDE to avoid confusion with the word LEAD as in the metal used in typesetting (/lɛd/), which is itself still a common term in the printing and journalism world.
Permit me to expand a bit.
Diffuse (verb):
- 1 a: to pour out and permit or cause to spread freely.
- b: extend, scatter.
- c: to spread thinly or wastefully.
Defuse: You literally defuse a bomb. You metaphorically defuse a highly charged situation to keep it from metaphorically blowing up; you do not diffuse it, because that makes no sense.
Device (noun): a mechanism or tool used for some sort of task.
Devise (verb): to develop or design something, e.g. a plan, solution, or even a device.