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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3727 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I have an enormous list of pet peeves about this issue, from things I see way too often online. Like my ever-growing list of words I see commonly confused — like "wary" vs. "weary" (which aren't even homophones!), or "cue" vs. "queue" (where too many end up deciding on "que" which isn't even an English word!), or "prosecute" vs. "persecute". (I think the worst I ever saw, though, was someone who consistently used "hieratic" when they meant "heretic.") There's the increasing neglect of the vocative comma (or as one member of a writing group I attended for a time colorfully called it, the "let's eat Grandma" comma). The serious misunderstandings of the paragraph-placement-in-dialogue rule (likely driven at least partially by the way they, IME, tend to teach it in school). Increasing usage of "sat" in contexts calling for "sitting" or "seated" (i.e. something like "John was sat in the chair").

That said, I'll confess to an unfortunate tendency, particularly when typing quickly, to mixing up the possessive determiner "its" and the contraction "it's."

Que is just ridiculous. I don't know of any language where that combination of letters would be pronounced the same as cue.

Another, one I've been seeing lately is disinterested instead of uninterested. Disinterested means something else.

On a related topic, I get really annoyed by some very common mispronunciations like processes pronounced like processeese as though it were the plural of processis or biases pronounced as though it were the plural of biasis. This is extremely common among supposedly educated people.

Disinterested means something else.

Please explain.

Uninterested means not interested. Disinterested means not having a stake in something. For example, the judge should be disinterested, but not uninterested in the case.

Thanks!

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