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Language For You
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Posts about writing, intended for college students and mature high school students; posts about learning English as a foreign language; occasional posts about translating from German to English.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'words'
Confusable Words and Online Dictionaries
allude / elude Allude and elude are both verbs. They sound similar, though not identical, but their meanings are different. If you click on the previous links, you will find yourself at each definiti...
“Woody and Tinny Words”
Here’s a funny Monty Python sketch about words. It includes a few “naughty words” too, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. You might also want to read the transcript....
Fighting Poor English Usage
Whenever I run across words that people mix up with other words, I try to explain the problem. This effort has led to posts on the following words: between / among, many / much, ...
George Carlin on Euphamistic Language
George Carlin died yesterday. Here is some standup comedy he did on “soft language.” The mention of “freedom fighters” in it makes me think of the Reagan administration in the ...
More Confusable Words
effect / affect — The primary meanings of these two words are similar, but effect is a noun and affect is a verb. They are not interchangeable. If she makes your heart race, we could say she affects...
Sloppy Rhetoric
I wrote a brief piece about appeasement on my history blog, Clio and Me. I mention it here, because President Bush is using a word with a specific historical meaning for political criticisms that have...
Word Mix-ups
en masse I ran into a statement last week about women being tried, convicted and executed “in mass” as witches. The author’s meaning was pretty clear, but I stumbled over the sentenc...
Dictionaries Can Tell You How to Use Words
I frequently encounter situations in which students pick the right word, but use it improperly in their sentence. If you are even the slightest bit unsure about how to use a word, look it up. This com...
Confusable Words (1)
First posted on History Survey There are a lot of small words in English that many of us confuse. Here are three examples: between / among — We use between for two things and among for three or ...
Beware the Thesaurus
First posted on History Survey The thesaurus is a useful tool, but it can also be dangerous. It is not enough to look for synonyms and assume that these words mean what you think they mean. If the wor...