“Spurious” reminds me of spewing furiously.
“The hamster drank too much and got spuriously sick behind the bar.”
You may be onto something.
Be damned. I thought it meant that, too. But I’ve never heard it used, just read it, does that mean I’m excused? 
Ignorance fought.
In the field of computers and software, the adjective “transparent (to the user)” implies that the component or enhancement is completely invisible to the user. But that’s always sounded wrong to me; I think it naturally implies that the added component is highly visible, as if the user can see its inner workings.
‘Svelte’ has always sounded to me like it should be describing someone really curvy.
Sounds about right. Thank you
I don’t know whether anyone will find this interesting, but I was personally unaware of the word *ravel * until I studied several programming languages in my mid-20’s including APL. (Darn! I forgot that this particular public PC has issues and won’t let me open a window for an article to link.) It was a language that eventually was considered more trouble than it was worth, but boy, it couldn’t be beat (at the time) for its flexibility in directly handling mathematical operations, especially ones extended over arrays of 1,2, or higher dimension. Mathematica came along without the numerous disadvantages.
Those who get sqicked out by anything mathematical should skip to the last sentence of this post.
One such operation was “ravel” and it meant take an array, such as a matrix (two dimensional array), and reduce it to a single row of values, called a one-dimensional array, or vector.
For instance, if you had, stored as the 2x3 variable A:
3 1 4
1 5 9
(The spaces make the number values separate)
… Now, if you established that B was the “ravel of” A by:
B <- ,A
“Set B as the ravel function on A”
Then printing out B would give you: 3 1 4 1 5 9.
In a book by (IIRC) Iverson he went out of his way to encourage readers to note with a dictionary that *ravel *(general meaning) was equivalent to unravel. 
Well, it kind of depends on if you’re using the real definition of curvy or the personal ads definition, doesn’t it? Used to be that you could be slender and curvy both.
True conversation I once had with a co-worker:
Me: “Did you question that prisoner about the fight he was in yesterday to see if he had any more information?”
Him: “Yes I did. He recanted everything he said yesterday.”
Me: “Really. So what’s his story now?”
Him: “What do you mean?”
Me: “What does he say today about the fight?”
Him: “The same thing he said yesterday. I told you he recanted what he said.”
Me: “You have no idea what that word means, do you.”
Bucolic sounds like disease infested, hellish, but isn’t.
I always thought that “uvula” sounds more like it should be part of one’s vagina, rather than the little hangy-thing in your throat that controls your gag reflex. Maybe because it sounds similiar to “vulva”.
Whooo boy, you do not want to confuse those two things.
Trust me on this.
And don’t get the vuvuzela into the mix…
“Droll” has suffered the same fate as “Nimrod”–it’s used sarcastically more than it’s used sincerely–often as a response to sarcastic humor “Oh, verry droll!” (Spoken in a Fred Flintstone voice.)
Naw, I never confuse words like this.
I recently bought a book online, and it finally arrived today. It’s a history of a particular subject. The book is way smaller that I imagined it, and skips over a lot of important details.
Apparently I don’t know the difference between a complete history and a concise history.
**Credit **and **debit **mean the opposite of what I thought.
Terrific sounds kind of like a mix between terrible and horrific.
I believe “terrific” is etymologically related to “terror/terrible/terrify” and such. So, “terrific” indeed used to mean something like “terrifying”, centuries ago. For whatever reason, the meaning changed completely.
My ex husband used “sporadic” to mean “spontaneous” so often that I finally had to look it up for myself. This was especially weird when we would just have some random," Hey its two pm on a Tuesday, lets-go-for-it wild sex" and then he would say “Wow, that was sporadic”.
Ummm, no. Nice try honey, and because you can’t use a dictionary, it will be a long irregular interval until we have sex again.*(Since he’s an ex now, I am curious… would “never ever again are you out of your flipping mind**” be a predictable interval, or an unpredictable interval?) Just so I know how sporadic sex with my ex husband is. I’m not good with probability equations and all that.
*I wouldn’t have really done that.
**I am really doing this. I mean if he asked. But we haven’t spoken in about 5 years so it is extremely unlikely to ever come up.
Damn! now I think phlegmatic should mean you have a blocked nose!!
I confuse atypical and typical from time to time. You’d think the opposite meanings would be clear enough…