Words, Words, Words
Hello, all! Thank you to everyone who responded with homonym misspellings in September! I found a few more from webinar announcements, and I was emailed several other online misspellings that clearly fall into my “SpellCheck Won’t Help You” chapter of an upcoming book about Persuasive Communications. What about these examples? They REALLY made me want…
Communicating online instead of in person means spelling is extra important – especially when words sound the same but are spelled differently. Here are a couple of examples I have seen recently. While I take the rest of September off from posting, I’d love it if you all would look for other misspelled homonyms and…
I thought you’d like to see an old printing press. One of your fellow subscribers just bought a house and the seller left this for her! Surprise! Katie’s first challenge was to figure out what the heck it was! Now that she has discovered it is a printing press, she’s looking for a buyer :)….
Could we all please agree that we are waiting for the virus vaccine, not waiting on the vaccine? We wait for a train (while waiting “on” the platform). I think I would need to be a gymnast to wait on the train (especially while it’s moving . . . ). We wait for our friends…
While we are on the discussion of upper and lower case letters and upper and lower case . . . wait! Is it numbers or numerals? I confess that I use the word “number” for everything, but after researching, I learned that I should choose the word “numeral” for most of my uses. Last week’s…
Last week, I talked about upper and lower case letters. This week, let’s consider an outline. We use upper case letters in an outline [A, B, C, etc.]. These letters are then generally followed by a period. For more detailed outlines, we add lower case letters [a, b, c, etc.]. I’ve seen these smaller letters…
The use of “upper case” and “lower case” when describing capital letters or “small” letters comes from the early printing days. Each letter was made into a block. The block letters were placed by hand in a row to make words that would be inked and then paper would be placed on top of the…
I just read that the “ick” sound at the end of a word is spelled “ick” when that word has only one syllable, as is sick. When the word has more than one syllable, that same sound is spelled “ic,” as in psychic. Why this language has to be so confusing, I will never know…
Speaking of homonyms, check out this Note on a survey: “Steal Guardrail Overhead.” HAHA! Should I follow these instructions?
All of this talk about a pandemic made me want to know more about its definition. “Demic” (or deme or demos from Greek) is often defined as a district. When you add the prefix “epi,” we find definitions that refer to a disease affecting many people but, again, on a somewhat localized basis, affecting a…