Usage Bitch

[azurelunatic]

Let me introduce you to one of my favorite words. Two, in fact.

The first one is an imported word. French. In fact, it's not even quite imported to English yet; it hasn't been used enough. Adieu. It means, "Goodbye". "Farewell". It is what you say when you are leaving and waving at someone else, or what they say to you. Used: "I bid you adieu." Show's over. Night-night. Time to leave. Breaking it down at Merriam-Webster, we find that the component words include Deity, so one might resonably translate it to mean "Go with God."

The second one dates back to the 14th Century CE, and is English. This sucker's old. Ado. As in, Much Ado About Nothing. It means "1 : fussy bustling excitement : TO-DO; 2 : time-wasting bother over trivial details -- 'wrote the paper without further ado'; 3 : TROUBLE, DIFFICULTY." There was much ado when the water started pouring out of the A/C.


These words are not the same. They are pronounced the same, but they are not spelled the same. They do not mean the same thing. Do not confuse them. You will look silly, and I will know the difference.

Comments

[yaksha42.livejournal.com]

Ghaaa! I really need you to spell check my stuff before I post it :-p

I always have typos like that. Usually I don't spell a word wrong, I put the wrong word in it's place. Some rather interesting words have ended up in places they shouldn't ... one of the more amusing ones was when I used "Hallah" instead of "humor" ... what? They both start with "h" ... ;)

Pedant mode = on

[azurelunatic]

Um.

It's is a contraction for "it is".

[boojum.livejournal.com]

They're not pronounced the same, either. ah-DYOO versus ah-DOO. Or is it a dialectical thing?

My personal spellcheck favorite (to laugh at and to weep over) is "voila". The spinning mailing list, which I've largely stopped reading, contains many people who like this word, none of whom can spell it. They alternate between "wah-lah" (thus showing they can't hear) and "viola" (thus showing that they're the spellchecker's bitch).

[azurelunatic]

Many dialects mangle them into something so similar you have to strain to hear it.

[n3m3sis42.livejournal.com]

This is a personal bitch of mine, too.

[yaksha42.livejournal.com]

Word told me it was spelled correctly!

*kicks Microsoft*

:-p

Re:

[n3m3sis42.livejournal.com]

Spell checkers that don't know the difference between homonym pairs is also a personal bitch of mine, but a) I'm not sure how you can get around issues like that with spell checkers, and b) "ado" and "adieu" are not homonyms, and someone already pointed out earlier. It would be nice if someone taught spell checkers how to recognize common errors like that.

Another one: people saying "it's a mute point" instead of "moot point". Heard that one a lot.

[azurelunatic]

Ghaaaaaaaa.