Yesterday, I browsed the user comments on a news website, and noticed that somebody wrote Heads off Judging from the context and the rest of the comment he/she was clearly trying to say Hats off While spelling mistakes happen to all of us, the change of meaning here is particularly dramatic.
A couple of days ago, I came across a confusing paper napkin. The confusing bit was the slogan printed on the napkin: The phrase for ecological thinking people is either grammatically incorrect (it should read for ecologically thinking people), or missing a comma after ecological (leaving out the comma is very confusing, and most people
While my blog is usually concerned with the English language, today I want to mention a topic for advanced learners of German. In Germany (but not usually in Austria and Switzerland), it is quite common to abbreviate the word einen with ‘nen (the apostrophe is not always used, but is required since it indicates that
Whereas the German word homogen is rather straight forward to pronounce, the English equivalent, homogeneous, is slightly trickier. Oxford English suggests [ˌhɒməˈdʒiːniəs] (British English) and [ˌhoʊməˈdʒiːniəs] (American English), see and listen here. On the other hand, the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary includes the following possibilities: British English: [ˌhɒməʊˈdʒiːniəs] (used by 75% of the speakers) [ˌhoʊməʊˈdʒiːniəs] (used
The adjectives discreet and discrete can easily be confused in writing, for various reasons. First, when typing quickly, the second e may just slip in before the t. Because both words exist, this mistake will not be detected by the spell checker. However, in addition, the pronunciation of discreet and discrete is identical, see here
The plural of phenomenon is either phenomena or, especially in North America, phenomenons. However, I frequently see people incorrectly use phenomena as the singular form, for example in This phenomena is very general … The correct form is of course This phenomenon is very general …
The phrase et al. is often used when referring to scientific papers by a group of authors, and means “and others”. Instead of naming all the authors (the average number of authors on scientific papers has been increasing for many decades, see here, here, and here for interesting discussions of this phenomenon), it is common
Mastering pronunciation is a difficult task when learning a language. However, isn’t it ironic that the word pronunciation is spelled and pronounced differently than the word pronounce? The first difficulty is that many people misspell pronunciation as pronounciation. However, even if you get the spelling right, it is important to notice that “pronounce” is to
[Zur deutschen Version dieses Posts wechseln] Loose, lose, looser, and loser often cause problems among both native and non-native speakers. The reason is quite obvious: their spelling and pronunciation are rather similar. Just by counting the number of o’s, we can guess that lose and loser are related, as are loose and looser. However, the
Although Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees have now spread far beyond English-speaking countries, there is still a lot of confusions about the correct spelling. Importantly, in expression such as Master’s thesis, Bachelor’s thesis, Master’s degree or Master’s student, the apostrophe is part of the correct spelling, indicating that the thesis was written by a person that