Ahh, thank you. When @Lumpy brought up the idea of the Bursar, their example was of someone disbursing funds. So I figured payroll, accounts payable, or a section thereof.
Whereas my only practical experience of the Bursar’s office as a student was paying them. IOW accounts receivable, or a section thereof.
To be a part of something and to be apart of something mean pretty much the opposite of each other. I’m surprised at how often people substitute the latter for the former.
Can you say that in your dialect? It’s always “apart from” for me.
Not really, but people (mistakenly) do anyway.
a while: noun phrase meaning “a period of time”
awhile: adverb meaning “for a (usually brief) period of time”
I wrote awhile then stepped away. A while later I came back to read what I had written.
Note that while can also be a conjunction (“I whistle while I work”) or verb (“I while away the time”), but these are less likely to be confused.
Acuity = sharp-mindedness
Alacrity = enthusiasm
Celerity = swiftness
I tried to seatch the thread, truly I did.
There’s reign and rein. A monarch reigns, and a horse is reined in.
Manner and manor. To the manor born means one has high social rank, and one’s manner is how one behaves.
The original phrasing is “to the manner born” (originally seeming to mean “accustomed to witnessing the habit from birth”). It’s from Hamlet, act 1, scene 4, where Hamlet is discussing Danish drinking habits.
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honored in the breach than the observance.
“To the manor born” (seeming to mean “having been born in a large fancy country house”) is an old variant that really took off around 1980 when the BBC sitcom To the Manor Born was on the air. The title was an intentional pun on Shakespeare’s line, not an error.
I don’t normally use either phrase, and have no strong opinion on which form is correct in the sense of a person born into a rich family.
imply: suggest without explicitly stating
infer: assume/deduce from what isn’t explicitly stated
So these are opposite sides of the same conversational event: the speaker implies something, and then hopes that the listener correctly infers what was being implied.
implication: something implied, a suggestion or conclusion
imprecation: a slur or epithet
Yeah.
I think a lot of the misuses people make are like that imply/infer pair. They represent two sides of a transaction and folks often use the wrong word for their side of it, although they correctly recognize the sort of transaction they’re participating in.
Indeed, and I hear people reversing them (or at least using “infer” for “imply”) all the time
Is there an echo in here? 
intimate: to make known
imitate: to do or try to do after the manner of
volar: pertaining to the palm of the hand or the sole of the foot
velar: referring to a veil or velum
irrupt: to break in
erupt: to burst forth
pronounced the same, for extra confusion!
Just heard the first of these used wrongly in a podcast (should have been the second one), so:
Proscribe - to ban
Describe - give an account or representation of, in words
Prescribe - to professionally recommend
Inscribe - to etch or write
Ascribe - to refer to a supposed cause, source, or author : to say or think that (something) is caused by, comes from, or is associated with a particular person or thing
Hologram - a three-dimensional picture.
Holograph - handwriting.