Has anyone mentioned demur and demure? Just saw the mistake in the wild. “Demure” was used as a verb in the past tense-- that is “She demured,” to mean “She declined to participate.” In this case, in some Halloween pranking that seemed innocent, but was bound to go wrong, or there wouldn’t be a story.
You can demur because you are demure, so there’s some overlap of meaning, but as far as I know, there’s no verb form of demure, and if there’s an adjectival form of demur, it’s even less common then the verb form.
I’m sure I’ve read sentences along the lines of “Bob demurred on the party invite.” I may be wrong, but I’ve always considered that to be a correct usage. The second “r” is what distinguishes the various forms of “demur” from forms of “demure”
There’s also Demurrer - Wikipedia. Which is a legal term of art, but is a noun form related to demur.
But yeah, your example from the wild is wrong for lack of a second “r”.
Prevaricate: to speak evasively or ambiguously, so as to conceal guilt or avoid an awkward question
Procrastinate: to delay/postpone/put off some action.
(Just saw in my paper “a long prevaricated law suit” - I suppose they might have meant it, but I suspect “procrastinated” was what they were aiming at)
That’s actually a typo. I’m surprised that the spellcheck didn’t catch it, unless one R is some kind of antiquated variant, but spellcheck allows it. Or it was just really late at night when I posted.
The browser’s built-in find in page is useless in Discourse. That’s true on every type of computer and brand of browser. Because the browser only knows about a couple screen’s worth of posts surrounding the ones that you can see on-screen at this instant. Discourse swaps them in and out as you scroll up or down.
Always use Discourse search. It is NOT flaky. Only operators are flaky.
Led/Lead is still getting confused on this board all the time. It’s been brought up in this thread at least twice over the last 3 years (by me and others).
I have seen gain the system a couple of times in the last few weeks. It makes a certain amount of sense, since the near-synonym capture is used in similar constructions (e.g., regulatory capture). But the correct phrase is game the system (i.e., to exploit loopholes in the “game” or other rule-bound system, in a way not foreseen by the creators of the rules, to ensure your desired outcome).
tort: in the law, a civil wrong subject to redress through lawsuits in the civil justice system (as distinct from the criminal justice system)
torte: a cake-like dessert
slander: (v) to defame in speech; (n) defamation in speech or the tort of defaming in speech
libel: (v) to defame in writing; (n) defamation of character in writing, or the tort of defaming in writing
liable: obliged to, responsible for, or subject to; sometimes used as a synonym for the below, but that usage is frowned on by prescriptivists
likely: probable
You slandered me by saying my raspberry torte tasted like feet, thereby ruining my reputation as a baker. I’m going to sue you for the tort of slander. Then you libeled me by writing on the message board that I’m acting like a baby, thereby ruining my reputation as a reasonable person. Now I’m going to sue you for libel too. The court is likely (but not liable) to find you liable for damages in the millions.
