cannon: a gun, barrel of a gun
canyon (older spelling cañón): valley [not the same word as cannon in English]
canon: a generally accepted principle; a musical round
slight: small, slender
sleight: cunning, dexterity
sloyd: handicraft
A Scandinavian system of education focused on handicraft on the development of handicraft skills. Interesting in general as an educational system, and more specifically for the particular skill development instructions used in woodworking, sewing, and paper folding.
rigorous: extremely accurate, strict, or thorough
vigorous: extremely strong, energetic, or healthy
We normally talk about “rigorous diets” (= strict) and “vigorous exercise” (= physically intense), though you can make a case that “vigorous diet” (= healthy) and “rigorous exercise” (= painstaking) also making sense.
vigorish: what you better pay your loan shark every week
Nigerian: from Nigeria
Nigerien: from Niger
I’ve wondered if there is a formal set of rules for which suffixes are used to name a people after a place: -ite -ian -on -an etc.
I can’t find a clip. If you can watch Taxi Season 3 Episode 13 - Zen and the Art of Cab Driving, near the end you’ll hear a debate about the naming of people from Delaware. So no rules, it’s up to the democratic process to decide. Transcript:
You might find this thread to be of interest:
Wikipedia has “Delawareans”!!
But what, if any, rules tell you how to choose among the possible Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic, Semitic, etc. suffixes? [Or no suffix: “a Swahili”, or something irregular]
Also the name of the people may not be the same as the adjective at all: Briton versus British, Swahili vs Swahilian/Swahilese, Jew vs Jewish, Scot vs Scottish [cf.: Scots language, Scotch whisky; do not get confused!]
From another thread active today:
odorous: having an odor, whether good, bad, or indifferent
malodorous: having a bad odor
odoriferous: synonym of odorous
onerous: burdensome
odious: detestable
(not to be confused with Judaic or Judaical)
Diesel: an engine named after a German engineer
deasil: towards the right; clockwise
Israelite: a member of the ancient twelve tribes of Israel
Israeli: a citizen of the modern nation of Israel
Colombia: tropical country
Columbia: America
Have: A verb used together with would/could/should when describing alternative choices one might have made in the past under different circumstances. “I would have gone to the store with him if he could have driven. He should have just stayed home.”
Of: A preposition that is not the correct word to use with would/should/could. “I would of gone to the store with him if he could of driven. He should of just stayed home.”
If you’re ever confused about whether to use have or of, just try deleting the would/could/should and see if the sentence still makes grammatical sense:
“I would of left the party.”
OK, now drop the “would”:
“I of left the party.” Doesn’t make gramatical sense, so “of” is the wrong word here.
Try it with “have” instead.
“I would have left the party.”
Now drop the “would”:
“I have left the party.” Still makes grammatical sense.
I was listening to song lyrics where “we” (nominative) was confused with “us” (accusative):
“You are not you, you are now us”
…then “us” was rhymed with “trust” so it was probably deliberate…
It’s what people use (going by the sound) when they should use " -'ve “. I wouldn’t’ve used “of”, but for some reason I wasn’t sure what it should be (until I was in my early 20s!) so I always wrote out the " have”.
I don’t know how common the confusion is, but I used to get the following confused:
sallow: of an unhealthy pale complexion
callow: young and inexperienced
And mallow, a type of gummy plant growing in swampy land from which a certain type of candy was once made.
And “fallow” meaning unused.
I don’t get “callow” confused with mallow or fallow, and only rarely with sallow, but I do get it confused with callous.