The only one of these that I may have misused in the past is “bemused.” The rest I already had down cold.
13 thoughts on “Ten Misused Words In English”
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The only one of these that I may have misused in the past is “bemused.” The rest I already had down cold.
Comments are closed.
Hah. Pretty much the same for me.
Excluding “enormousness” as an alternate meaning of enormity seems to be an enormity in its own right:
3. greatness of size, scope, extent, or influence; immensity: The enormity of such an act of generosity is staggering.
There’s another one that bugs me to no end: erstwhile. It’s a perfectly good word, which many people think means something entirely different from what it actually means.
I’d have picked than/then, affect/effect, inflammable.
But the proper word for today is: schadenfreude.
Language does work that way. If the majority of speakers don’t agree with the meaning that is written in a dictionary then the dictionary is wrong, not the people.
Who uses plethora? I know what it means, and that it’s usually used incorrectly, but is it common?
I abandoned using “nonplussed”, because everyone thought I meant the opposite of what I meant.
Trent, you crack me up. Right and wrong are not democratic concepts.
One can be a-mused or be-mused, as it were, but the progression strangely stops there. I’d like to propose that we add cee-mused (spelling open for debate), which would simply mean to be amused by something one sees. From there we can readily move onto de-mused–one was amused, bemused, or ceemused, but one no longer is: one is now demused. E-mused is obvious–one is now amused, bemused or ceemused by something one has seen on the Internet, often in the form of a forwarded email (this will help future scholars trace the derivation). Hopefully this post is somewhat emusing.
And so forth…
Jiminator, I’m glad I “crack you up” but the field of linguistics is the study of language, not the codification of it. Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. It is this reason why we don’t all still talk like hamlet.
#11 disinterested
≠ uninterested, by God
Never used the word, know what it means: nonplussed.
Never used the word, fell for the common misdefinition: enormity, noisome.
Encountered the word maybe once or twice in my life (50 yrs old), never looked it up: fulsome.
Use the word, know what it means: the other six.
Trent is absolutely correct and in addition has summarized the problem with modern society.
Wither thou understanding?