Just recently I was in a conversation with a number of UK mainlanders and we had a debate over what “tories” meant, apparently disproportionately ordinarily it refers to a political party and it’s not usual to use it as short for “territories” as I’ve used it (according to how the debate ended, it was half and half between them). And once again I’m reminded of how people feel to look back at their usage of a word/phrase over the years and cringe.
More tragically, me and a friend were embarrassed once upon realizing everyone was confusing “encephalitis” with “hydrocephalus” when talking to someone about their kid with hydrocephalus. Awkward because encephalitis is caused by HIV.
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every word i use is right, its the english language that is wrong
literally
literally
literally
literally
Laterally
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. ’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things. ’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that’s all.”
One could say language is what we make of it.
I was homeschooled and was basically educated by books, so I have a massively large vocabulary and I mostly use it correctly.
But pronunciation? I’m fucked.
You have “a massively large vocabulary” and couldn’t think of anything other than “massively large”? 🤔
I was raised by dyslexic wolves in a dixie cup full of turds and was basically educated by punches, so naturally my encyclopedic repertoire of words is aptly humbled by the plentiful platitude of my somewhat planar pronunciation.
ah. youve read the mormon bible.
Come on, that’s still super better than all the super unimaginative kids who super use super as a superlative every super single sentence
I only use latives because of that.
I take your point, but please consider: People who like to show off their checks thesaurus prodigious vocabularies are generally insufferable to be around.
I’ll clap for prodigious and the insult!
My vocabulary is big huge!
Doesn’t mean he needs to put on airs.
My wife is the same. Very well read, but never learned the pronounciation of her fancy words.
Imagine the look on her face when I explained that the “hors d’oeuvres” she read about in books are the same thing as the “or durves” she was serving at the party.
I had the opposite, I always thought the word “grandiose” I saw in books was the word “grandeur” that I hear people say, so I always read “grandiose” as “grandeur” and thought “grandeur” was spelled that way. Whenever I heard people say “gran-di-ose” I would pipe up “uh, actually, it’s pronounced grandeur, the s is silent”.
Very similar to this, on multiple occasions I’d try to make macarons and accidentally make macaroons and vice versa.
My son is a voracious reader, and he has the same thing. He’s 15 now but still, every so often, he’ll say a word and it’ll take me a minute to figure out what he means.
With my accent I’m told this is a common issue for me. Not that I notice, even when pointed out.
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I don’t really value pronunciation as much as some do. If you understand what you’re talking about, that matters more than being exposed and remembering the right pronunciation.
So many words we never hear people say, but we read them and have to know them.
Encephalitis is caused by viral infections. Our immune system usually suppresses said viruses, and HIV takes away the ability to suppress them.
This happens with a lot of illnesses… thrush, Tuberculosis, fungal infections. HIV allows a lot of stuff to have far worse impact than it normally would.
That’s not quite the same as HIV causing them… Pedantic maybe, but since we’re talking about words meaning things… ;)
Encephalitis literally just means “in the brain inflammation”.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/encephalitis
This brain inflammation can be caused by many things. Quote from Mayo Clinic:
Encephalitis is inflammation of the brain. There are several causes, including viral infection, autoimmune inflammation, bacterial infection, insect bites and others.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/encephalitis/symptoms-causes/syc-20356136
It can also be caused by prions. Mad cow disease is aka bovine spongiform encephalitis. I believe the word just indicates cell death in the brain which leaves regions of dead tissue.
True, but in the context of talking about someone’s child in my local culture, it raises an eyebrow or two if the other person doesn’t associate the two conditions.
it raises an eyebrow or two if the other person doesn’t associate the two conditions.
I don’t get it. It raises an eyebrow if you don’t link encephalitis and HIV? I’m about 90% sure I must be misunderstanding you…
Encephalitis has many causes, yes, but HIV is the one that sticks out. If you go to someone and talk about it, they’re going to have the same “assume the worse” or “out of context” mindset as if you were to talk about mononucleosis (to give a distant analogy). Sure, mononucleosis can be caused by several things, such as sharing a toothbrush or having someone cry on you, but everyone associates it with what it’s famous for, being spread through liberal usage of intimacy. Same with encephalitis. So when you go to a random neighbor here and say “how is the kid with encephalitis” they’re not going to take it well. People here are prudish like that.
You have a very exceptional bubble. Or a false impression.
Freedom.
Apparently where I live it means torture people till they off themselves.
Either you’re being edgy or you live somewhere truly horrendous.
USA
The why not both option.
Its doublespeak then or something
Curious now to know where you live. That sounds like a rough culture.
Sounds like a yank. Poor sod.
Oh in English – I used to say renumerate (numerate a second time) instead of remunerate (pay someone for a thing).
Me too!! I’m Italian and I used to say “renumerare” instead of “remunerare”.
If you’re curious, the verb comes from Latin “munus” = service/duty/tax
Yup, that makes sense!
I’ve cornered the market on Latin-Vietnamese cross-language humor though. Stay off my turf :P
holy… well, blow me.
I have never heard nor saw it spelled “remunerate”.
Yup, that was the case for me too. I think I only figured it out when I was like 30.
Man, I’m a voracious reader, my heads full of words I probably put the wrong emphasis on but it ain’t like when i was younger when i would completely and consistently mispronounce words i could spell, and no one would correct me, because they didn’t know either. But this one, I absolutely would have caught this one. Every author, reporter, newscaster, writer I can think of, has apparently spelled or pronounced it wrong and seems it’s in some dictionaries, i just learnt.
Ah yeah, that was me as a kid too. I read whatever I could get ahold of, which was mostly English and French from 50+ years ago (yay, secondhand books and copyrights expiring). So my vocabulary in both languages was (and occasionally remains) antiquated. My pronunciation fixed itself some time after university, but was weird in my youth.
I’ve since de-prioritized human language, for practical reasons. Communicating with machines efficiently is simply much more productive (and lucrative)! My shorthand also is it’s own language, where there is no distinction between letters and numbers, of which there are 16, and they phonetically map to English. Hexadecimal English, or Hexen for short. It’s optimized for writing quickly (every character is precisely 1 stroke).
Quite handy for taking notes around people I don’t want reading them, too.
Holy shit. You ever have that moment when you realize you’re talking to someone way the fuck smarter than you? I understand what you’re doing, good explanation, but I don’t want to play chess against you.
Truth be told, I’m terrible at chess (so… you’re not wrong). Games where I have perfect knowledge of the state of play, and where one player moves first, I don’t enjoy much. For each of these games, there provably exists a strategy where the first player that moves can only win or draw. This strategy is trivial for tic-tac-toe, known for checkers, but unknown for chess (although we know it exists). Anyway, just knowing that sort of ruins it for me.
Anyway, I know that feeling well! I’m not that smart, I just study a few subjects a lot. There are just so many things I don’t know, that it’s easy to find people I can learn from.
Games where I have perfect knowledge of the state of play, and where one player moves first, I don’t enjoy much. For each of these games, there provably exists a strategy where the first player that moves can only win or draw
That doesn’t seem quite correct for any game meeting those criteria (I’d also add that the game is deterministic - no true randomness in the game either, since that is distinct from state - otherwise the outcome could trivially depend on random events). There are two other possibilities for a deterministic game: that optimal gameplay by both players will always end in the second (or another player if more than two) winning, or that optimal gameplay by both players will result in a game that never ends (impossible for games with a finite number of states, and rule that the game ends in an outcome if the same state recurs too many times - like chess).
A trivial example of a (poor) game that would meets your criterion but where the first player loses under optimal strategy: Players take turns placing a counter anywhere in the play area from an infinite supply of counters. Players cannot skip a turn. If there are an even number of counters on the board after a player’s turn, the player who placed the counter can optionally declare victory and win. Not a game I’d play, but it does prove there exist deterministic open state games where one player moves first where the first player will not win or tie.
In a 3+ player deterministic open state game, the actions of a player who goes on to lose could impact which of the remaining players win (they are essentially just a different source of non-determinism).
I think it is correct to say that any two-player deterministic open-state game which can only end in a draw, win, or tie, for any fixed initial conditions, there exists a strategy for one of the two players that will ensure that one of the three outcomes occurs: the game continues forever, that player draws, or that player wins. That can be proved by contradiction: either one or more move in the strategy decision tree can be improved to make the player win, which contradicts the strategy not existing, or the other player can rely on the strategy not existing for the first player to devise a strategy, which also contradicts no strategy existing for either player.
I’ve never had this problem in English nor Spanish but you made me realize those two words are very similar in Spanish too (reenumerar, remunerar)
How about " till " in English vs " 'til " ?
In English, a till is a cash drawer or a plough. The abbreviation for “until” is " 'til ".
I see it in subtitles. I worry for society.
TIL
Haha, sorry to confuse things further but this is not true .
Tldr, “till” is its own word and is actually older than the word until, and they’ve been used synonymously for centuries. 'Til with an apostrophe is acceptable but has been less common, and til without an apostrophe is even less common.
Wiktionary says it’s the other way around (until originates from til) and both til and till are correct: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/till#Etymology_1
Even happened in the comments here
“Shop till you drop” now has a whole new meaning.
I used the term ‘pursuant’ incorrectly for a long time. I thought it meant something like ‘things you do in order to achieve something’, like sweeping the floor is pursuant to getting the kitchen clean, vs the correct usage, which is either ‘in accordance with’, or ‘in a manner conformable to’. So a correct usage would be ‘sweeping the floor is pursuant to the procedure we set up to clean the kitchen’. Nice word, though. I like it.
As a foreigner I would have made that same mistake, since it sounds like it’s related to pursuit. Educational comments in this
sweeping the floor is persuant to the procedure…
Its more often used in formal and legal stuff. I’d kinda perceive you were being an ass or condescending if you were to use it that way. Like its just an annoying word generally.
You might want to simply say
“please do x like I showed you”
or something like that. I would honestly never use persuant unless I was a prosecutor even though I’m intimately familiar with its use in legal and other academic writing.
Just don’t use it, also is English your first language? I feel like no native English speaker would ever really use that aha
I cooked my poptart perfectly pursuant to the packaged directions?
Why not just say I made/had a poptart? Why do you need to get that descriptive about it, its junkfood that you just eat or pop in the toaster, hence the name. Is like a tart you pop in the toaster
Worst case, use according but I don’t get why you’d ever need to say that. Nobody who speaks English would really ever say that, that sounds like a textbook exercise lol
“As per my previous emails…”
I thought phallic (fálico) meant flawed (falho) and used it so much. I cringe when I remember this 😭
Hey go easy on yourself, we’re all phallic.
Awkward because encephalitis is caused by HIV.
From the NHS website:
Encephalitis is most often due to a virus, such as:
- herpes simplex viruses, which cause cold sores (this is the most common cause of encephalitis)
- the varicella zoster virus, which causes chickenpox and shingles
- measles, mumps and rubella viruses
- viruses spread by animals, such as tick-borne encephalitis, Japanese encephalitis, rabies (and possibly Zika virus)
Encephalitis caused by a virus is known as “viral encephalitis”. In rare cases, encephalitis is caused by bacteria, fungi or parasites.
Removed by mod
“I’m sorry, is ‘your rear is as creamy as a bowl of oatmeal’ not a compliment?”
“Your acne is like braille for your beauty”
I hate this so much!
Is encephalitis caused only by HIV, though?
I seem to think it was a thing before HIV.
You are correct. -itis just means inflammation or infection, encephalon just means brain. You can have encephalitis caused by multiple things, viruses, bacteria, fungal, auto immune diseases and so forth
No, but its largest association is with it.
literally, apparently.
Literal has been used as a non-literal exaggeration for centuries.
If kids could learn a second adverb that’d be great.
I happily described a nice coffee shop as “kitschy” to the guy behind the counter and quickly learned from his reaction that it isn’t the synonym for “artsy” that I thought it was.
It means “a naive imitation” for anyone who’s ears are turning red now. Puts on a wool cap.
And here I thought it meant quirky, fuck
If I’ve literally learned anything, it’s that if a bunch of us keep using it as a compliment to mean quirky, we can shift the meaning!
And what does it actually mean?
I thought something similar about the word “campy”, as in something so dry it becomes its own style.
I used poignant wrong for a long time, when it came to describing memories. I thought it meant the memories were strong, clear sensory ones but it meant sad ones.
TIL. I’ve been making the same mistake and had to look it up as a result of this comment.
When I was younger I actually thought “poignant” was how some accents say “pregnant”. Cue unnecessary congratulations.
I would say it means strong but with an implied sadness, but you can have positive poignant memories too - you’d just have to state they were positive. The day I graduated from University was poignant because it was the end of an era and the start of another, but it doesn’t mean it is a sad memory.
Nothing too big or embarrassing, but for a while I thought “nepotism” just meant the same as “narcissism” when it’s actually about favoritism towards one’s family.
I mean they are technically related.
