Saturday, July 31, 2010

Floccinaucinihilipilification - English editing.

Floccinaucinihilipilification, supposedly meaning ‘the action or habit of estimating something as worthless’, is one of a number of very long words that occur very rarely in genuine use.
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Friday, July 30, 2010

Fleshy, Fleshly - English editing.

Fleshy relates to flesh in its physical sense and means primarily ‘plump, fat’ (e.g. fleshy hands, fleshy fruit) whereas fleshly relates to the more metaphorical sense of flesh, and means ‘carnal, sensual, sexual’, as in fleshly desires, fleshly thoughts. To use fleshly to mean ‘plump’ or ‘fat’ will generally be considered incorrect.
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Thursday, July 29, 2010

Flaunt - English editing.

Flaunt and flout may sound similar but they have different meanings. Flaunt means ‘to display ostentatiously’, as in visitors who liked to flaunt their wealth, while flout means ‘to openly disregard’, as in new recruits growing their hair and flouting convention. It is a common error, recorded since around the 1940s, to use flaunt when flout is intended, as in the young woman had been flaunting the rules and regulations.
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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Flaccid - English editing.

The pronunciations /flak-sid/ and /flass-id/ are both standard. /Flak-sid/ is the older and more traditional one and enjoys support on the grounds that is follows the rule for other words containing -cci- or -cce- (succinct, access, etc.) except those derived from Italian (cappuccino etc.).
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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Fit - English editing.

For fit as a verb, the past tense and past participle in British English are fitted in all meanings: the dress fitted well; the dress fitted her well; we’ve fitted a new lock to the front door. In some parts of the US, fit can be used in the first two of these three meanings and is perfectly acceptable in US English: his head fit snugly into his collar; I tried on several jackets, but none fit me.
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Monday, July 26, 2010

Fish - English editing.

The normal plural of fish is fish: a shoal of fish; he caught two huge fish. The older form fishes are still used to refer to different kinds of fish: freshwater fishes of the British Isles.
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Saturday, July 24, 2010

Fetus - English editing.

The spelling foetus has no etymological basis but is recorded from the 16th century and until recently was the standard British spelling in both technical and non-technical use. In technical usage fetus is now the standard spelling throughout the English-speaking world, but foetus is still quite commonly found in British English outside technical contexts.
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Friday, July 23, 2010

(-Fest) - English editing.

-Fest is a now well-established suffix derived from the German word Fest meaning ‘festival, celebration’. It occurred first in American English in the late 19th century in the word gabfest meaning ‘a gathering for talking’ and spread rapidly to produce other words. It is now very freely used and produces terms such as slugfest, lovefest, and ladyfest.
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Thursday, July 22, 2010

February - English editing.

To pronounce February ‘the way it is written’ is not easy. It requires the separate pronunciation of both the r following the Feb- and the r in -ary, with an unstressed vowel in between: /feb-ruu-uh-ri/. By a process called dissimilation, in which one sound identical or very similar to an adjacent sound is replaced by a different sound, the r following Feb- has been replaced by a y sound:/feb-yuu-ri/. This is now the norm, especially in spontaneous speech, and is fast becoming the accepted standard.
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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Faze - English editing.

Faze means ‘to disconcert or disturb’ and is used informally in mainly negative contexts: the prospect of going on stage for forty minutes does not seem to have fazed her. In origin it is a 19th century American English variant of the ancient verb feeze ‘to drive off, to frighten away’ and has nothing to do with the ordinary verb phase. The spelling phase is now quite common, but it should be avoided in writing.
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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Extraordinary - English editing.

In British English, extraordinary is traditionally pronounced /ik-stror-din-ri/ as four syllables, the –a- being merged into the following -or- to form one syllable. The pronounciation as/eks-truh-or-din-ri/ is being increasingly heard, based on US pronunciation.
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Monday, July 19, 2010

Everyplace - English editing.

Everyplace is a modern American English synonym of everywhere: they seem to be everyplace we go. It is thought to be more ‘logical’ than everywhere, mirroring expressions such as everybody and every time – we don’t say everywho or everywhen!
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Saturday, July 17, 2010

Everyone - English editing.

The pronoun everyone, meaning ‘every person’, is correctly spelled as one word: everyone had a great time at the party. The two-word expression every one means ‘each individual of a group’, as in every one of the employees got a bouns at the end of the year.
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Friday, July 16, 2010

Everyday - English editing.

The adjective everyday, ‘relating to every day; ordinary’, is correctly spelled as one word (carrying out their everyday activities), but the adverbial phrase every day, meaning ‘each day’, is always spelled as two words: it rained every day.
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Thursday, July 15, 2010

Eurasian - English editing.

In the 19th century the world Eurasian was normally used to refer to a person of mixed British and Indian parentage. In its modern uses, however, the term is more often used to refer to a person of mixed white-American and South-East-Asian parentage.
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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

(-Ette) - English editing.

The use of -ette as a feminine suffix for forming new words is relatively recent: it was first recorded in the word suffragette at the beginning of the 20th century and has since been used to form only a handful of well-established words, including usherette and drum majorette, for example. Nowadays, when the tendency is to use words which are neutral in gender, the suffix -ette is not very common and new words formed using it tend to be restricted to the deliberately flippant or humorous, as, for example, bimbette, punkette, and ladette.
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Monday, July 12, 2010

Ethnic - English editing.

In recent years, ethnic has begun to be used in a euphemistic way to refer to non-white people as a whole, as in a radio station which broadcasts to the ethnic community in Birmingham. Although this usage is quite common, especially in journalism, it is considered by many to be inaccurate and mealy-mouthed and is better replaced by terms such as ‘black’, ‘Asian’, etc.
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Saturday, July 10, 2010

Et cetera (also etcetera) - English editing.

A common mispronunciation of et cetera involves replacing the t in et with a k: /ik-set-ruh/ instead of /it-set-ruh/. This follows a process known as ‘assimilation’ by which sounds become easier for the speaker to articulate, but careful speakers will tend to avoid it.
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Friday, July 9, 2010

Enthuse - English editing.

The verb enthuse was formed by shortening the noun enthusiasm. Like many verbs formed from nouns in this way, especially those from the US, traditionalists regard it as unacceptable. It is difficult to see why: forming verbs from nouns is a perfectly respectable means for creating new words in English: verbs like classify, commentate, and edit were also formed in this way, for example. Enthuse itself has now been in English for over 150 years.
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Thursday, July 8, 2010

Eskimo - English editing.

In recent years, the word Eskimo has come to be regarded as offensive (partly through the associations of the now discredited folk etymology ‘one who eats raw flesh’). The peoples inhabiting the regions from the central Canadian Arctic to western Greenland prefer to call themselves Inuit. The term Eskimo, however, continues to be the only term which can be properly understood as applying to the people as a whole and is still widely used in anthropological and archaeological contexts.
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Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Equidistant - English editing.

To refer to something being the same distance from two other points or places, equidistant is traditionally used with from, as though it were ‘equally distant from’: equidistant from Aberdeen and Inverness. The use of between instead, though quite widespread, would be considered incorrect by many people.
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Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Equally - English editing.

The construction equally as, as in follow-up discussion is equally as important, rather than . . . is equally important, is relatively common but is condemned on the grounds that it says the same thing twice. Either word can be used alone and be perfectly correct, e.g. follow-up discussion is equally important or follow-up discussion is as important.
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Monday, July 5, 2010

Equal - English editing.

It is widely held that adjectives such as equal and unique should not be modified and that it is incorrect to say more equal or very unique, on the grounds that these are adjectives which refer to a logical or mathematical absolute.
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Saturday, July 3, 2010

Envelop, Envelope - English editing.

Envelop, pronounced /in-vel-uhp/, is a verb, meaning ‘to wrap up, surround, etc’., while envelope, pronounced /en-vuh-lohp/ (or, increasingly rarely, /on-vuh-lohp/), is a noun, meaning ‘a container for a letter, etc.’.
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Friday, July 2, 2010

Enquire - English editing.

Usage guides have traditionally drawn a distinction between enquire and inquire, suggesting that, in British English at least, enquire is used for general meanings of ‘to ask’, while inquire is reserved for uses meaning ‘to make a formal investigation’. In practice, however, there is little difference in the way the two words are used, although enquire and enquiry are more common in British English while inquire and inquiry are more common in US English.
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Thursday, July 1, 2010

Enormity - English editing.

Enormity traditionally means the ‘extreme scale or seriousness of something bad or wrong’, as in his time in prison has still not been long enough to allow him to come to grips with the enormity of his crime, but it is not uncommon for it to be used as a synonym for hugeness or immensity, as in the enormity of French hypermarkets. Many people regard this use as wrong, arguing that as the word originally meant ‘crime, wickedness’ it should only be used in a negative sense, but the newer use is, now broadly accepted in standard English.
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