Do you know the way to them?
As is the difference between Oakland and Auckland.
Yep. Worked to all three. Could probably still find my way there if I had to. 
They’re each fun tourist destinations, but very differently so. If you end up in the wrong one, good chance your suitcase isn’t packed for the adventure you’re now going on.
Interesting because I’m going to have my students do a worksheet on this soon. A few I can remember are:
Illicit/elicit
Affect/effect
Moral/morale
As a Latin Americanist geographer, I’m embarrassed to ask: what’s the third San José you guys are referring to (besides CA and CR)?
Then there’s the guy who bought a ticket from New York to Oakland (CA) and woke up in Auckland (NZ)
The city of San Jose, California - Wikipedia has a main airport with the code SJC.
The city of San José, Costa Rica - Wikipedia has a main airport with the code SJO.
The tricky one is the “county” (roughly) of Los Cabos Municipality - Wikipedia at the southern tip of Baja California. Which “county” has a main airport with the code SJD. The county consists of mostly empty land plus the towns of Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo and a few small villages.
Historically Cabo San Lucas was the main touristy area and most folks called the area “Cabo” or “Cabo San Lucas” and wondered how come the airport code was SJD when there’s no SJ anywhere to be found.
The trick is in the other part of that area: the town of San José del Cabo which is the county seat and the town containing the airport. Everyone drives / rides through San José del Cabo to get to the beaches. As time has gone on, more touristy stuff is building in SJDC and it’s now the main growth area for new & trendy everything.
I see! Thanks. That’s the one part of Mexico I’m not personally familiar with.
You know what I think is neat? “Plumb” and “gauge” are synonyms, and so, sort of, are “plum” and “gage”.
It was frustrating enough to go to Austria and not find any kangaroos. Then I went to Auckland.
special: exceptional in some quality; exceeding the usual
especial: exceptionally distinguished; particular
Not a common one, I imagine, but I have just seen it in the wild:
inchoate - (adj.) just begun, not completely formed, or rudimentary
instead of
inculcate - (verb) repetitiously or insistently to urge or force something into someone’s mind,
exhausting: tiring
exhaustive: comprehensive
bridle: harness for a horse
bridal: pertaining to a bride or wedding
career: (v.) to move rapidly
careen: to tilt something on its side (especially a ship) or to sway back and forth
carom: to strike and rebound
There’s also
Ca-rash: what happens to a car driver after an excess of careening and caroming. Just don’t make a career of it.
reticent: inclined not to communicate; taciturn
hesitant: slow to act; reluctant
Yes, I know, most dictionaries also give another newer definition of reticent that makes it a synonym of hesitant. But that’s not the original meaning of the word.
I care about this, I really do, but I’m to busy fighting to keep the literal meaning of “literal.”
gram flour: made from chickpeas
Graham flour: made from whole wheat
human: relating to or characteristic of people
humane: showing consideration for the suffering of others
Africans, /ˈæf.ɹɪ.kənz/: natives of Africa, or their descendants living elsewhere
Afrikaans, /ˌæfrɪˈkɑːns/: a language related to Dutch, spoken especially in South Africa and Namibia by a variety of white and non-white ethnic groups
Afrikaners: white South Africans descended from Dutch settlers who traditionally speak Afrikkaans (or their descendants living in other countries); also called Boers.
Because I just saw this in the wild, here’s a pair:
mean & average
Skip to the end for TL;DR version.
Mean is a specific mathematical calculation by which you add up a list of values, and divide by the number of values. A mean can help give you a snapshot of a group of values, but only when a bit of other information is included, like median, mode, and range, because sometimes mean is not very useful when a group has a broad range, or a lot of outliers.
Average in common parlance is used interchangeably with mean, but it actually means an estimate of something based on middle values. It comes from a word that used to mean the price paid by shippers for damaged goods, which might be based on a mean of a few similar items, but the key was that the items for the mean were chosen because they were similar. You would not take the mean of every item being shipped in that load. You would have many dissimilar items, which would be like statistical outliers.
In stats, the mean has to include all outliers, but an average might include only those things two or fewer standard deviations from the mode-- in other words, a mean that excludes outliers. And average therefore involves a bit of opinion, and isn’t mathematical, which is why it isn’t used in stats, but it still is very useful in other ways, and estimating the value of damaged goods is certainly one.
TL;DR: mean is purely mathematical, used in statistics, and must include all values; average is meant to be a clearer picture in a single word, and looks at all determiners of typical value, partly by excluding outliers.
Interesting. Looking it up, I see it’s from an Arabic root (probably).