More Errors

Almost daily I get suggestions for additions to my list of common errors. Sometimes they are already on the Web site.

Today I got suggestions for three interesting errors: “off his own back" [off his own bat] “batter an eyelid” [bat an eyelid] and “set a president” [set a precedent].

The first two were actually already on the site, but on a page quite a few people don’t know about, so I thought it was worth mentioning here. It's my "More Errors" page, where I list errors that are not truly common, but are interesting enough to be recorded.

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/more.html

I check in Google to see how common a particular error is before writing it up. My arbitrary standard is at least 1,000 hits for the error to be judged common. Google can be confusing, because the feedback on the first page commonly reports far more hits than if you click through four or five pages of results.

“Setting a president” didn’t pass the test, but I did add it to the “More Errors” list.

The same correspondent asked for a listing for “seperately,” a common misspelling for “separately.” I do not write separate entries for most simple misspellings which would be caught by a spelling checker. I make occasional exceptions when I find the misspelling particularly interesting, but most of them simply go into my list of “other commonly misspelled words.”
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/misspelled.html

Both of these are reached by clicking on links at the bottom of the main errors page.
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html

More people would find them if I put them at the top of the page, but I don’t want too much clutter up top.

My extremely popular “Non-Errors” page also has a link in the same location. Unlike the misspelled words and "More Errors" the “Non-Errors” appear in the book among the other errors, in alphabetical order.

So what does it mean to do something “off your own bat,” anyway? This expression is common in the UK, Australia, and other places where cricket is popular. It refers to a run scored by a player hitting the ball himself rather than benefitting by the action of another player. So to do something off your own bat is to do it independently, on your own initiative.

Bonus point: is it “benefiting” or “benefitting”? According to most dictionaries, either one is OK.

Incredibly unbelievable

“Incredible” and “unbelievable” are greatly overused as synonyms for “amazing.“

From the first part of the entry on “incredible” in my book:

The other day I heard a film reviewer praise a director because he created “incredible characters,” which would literally mean unbelievable characters. What the reviewer meant to say, of course, was precisely the opposite: characters so lifelike as to seem like real people. Intensifiers and superlatives tend to get worn down quickly through overuse and become almost meaningless, but it is wise to be aware of their root meanings so that you don’t unintentionally utter absurdities.

(p. 122).

The problem is that when people use these words in this way they are always exaggerating. They mean something like “almost incredible.” This leads to all sorts of contradictory statements.

A woman writing about her cheating boyfriend to advice columnist Amy Dickinson says today, “He often denied evidence I found of his possible dalliances and made me believe it was all an unbelievable coincidence.”

The entry for “incredible” in the book inspired National Public Radio’s Scott Simon to write the following blurb, which you’ll find on the back cover of the second edition of Common Errors in English Usage:

I’d call Paul Brians’ book incredible, fabulous, or fantastic, except thanks to him, I know now that none of those words are what I really mean. Let’s just say that Common Errors in English Usage is the most cheerfully useful book I've read since the Kama Sutra.

New for 2012: Changes to the Common Errors in English Usage e-calendar mailings

A while back I wrote a post about my difficulties in delivering the Common Errors in English Usage daily entries, the e-version of what used to be a tear-off daily paper calendar. In that post, I described the impossibility of delivering massive amounts of e-mail through my own server and let followers of the calendar know that the e-mails would have a new look from then on.

But times change. The service I had signed up with has begun charging for what they do (it is not trivial), and since I am determined to keep the daily delivery free of charge, I am forced to once again change the delivery method for the e-calendar.

Unfortunately, this time the change will require subscribers to take action. If you would like to continue your subscription, please click this link to go to the blog dedicated to the Common Errors in English Usage daily entries and enter your e-mail address into the "FOLLOW BY EMAIL" section on the right side of the page. Follow the subsequent directions to complete the subscription (it takes less than a minute), and you will be back to receiving the entries in your mailbox every day. As always, your e-mail address will not be used for any other purpose than to deliver the entry to your inbox, and there will be an "unsubscribe" link to remove you from the list at any time.

I am sorry for the inconvenience, but I believe this will be the best long-term solution for keeping the daily entries coming free-of-charge and without further interruption.

A wrongly presented common error

As I go through my list of available common errors for the daily entry to the calendar, I come across some that have been removed from or significantly revised on the Common Errors in English Usage Web site. When this happens, I am often alerted by readers who point out something amiss in the entry. Here was the entry from December 29, 2011:

wrongly/wrong

“Wrongly” always precedes the verb it modifies: “He was wrongly suspected of having
used garlic powder in the lasagna.” “Wrong” is the word you want after the verb:
“She answered wrong.”

To which two readers responded with essentially the same (valid) point:

This is interesting.  I would say "She answered incorrectly."  I would not say "She
answered incorrect."  How is wrongly/wrong different?

I would also say "She was incorrect" not "She was incorrectly."  As I would say "She
was wrong."

and:

"She answered wrong" seems wrong to me.

Her answer was wrong (adjective modifying a noun).  She answered wrongly (adverb
modifying a verb, regardless of pre or post position relative to verb).  Similarly: 
"She answered incorrectly" and not "She answered incorrect."

I looked back at the Common Errors site and discovered that this was a case where the entry had been removed, though I still had it listed among the entries I use to create the daily entries. The point is not that the entry is wrong, but the entry is not fully fleshed out. If you have been saying "She answered wrongly," you are not grammatically incorrect, but the word "wrong" also does something that the word "incorrect" does not: it serves as an adverb as well as an adjective.

I still like the guideline of the entry: "wrongly" goes before the verb it modifies. But that is a guideline, not a comprehensive usage rule. It is perfectly correct (and necessary) to say, for example, "She was accused wrongly," if you are using that sort of inverted construction.

If you thought you observed something wrong about this entry, you were right!

My apologies for any confusion.

Mitts On or Off?

Journalists seeking to comment wittily on the attacks being made by his rivals on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney are finding the pun “The Mitts are off” irresistible.

The Last Word Blog on msn.com

Mara Liasson on National Public Radio

Ron Fournier in the National Journal

It’s true that “mitt” originated as an abbreviation of “mitten.” But the saying which equates mitts with fists in a boxing match is "put up your mitts,” not “take off your mitts.”

The journalists are cross-pollinating this saying with “the gloves are off,” as in bare-knuckle boxing.

If you know both sayings, you can catch the intended pun. Of course it’s Romney himself who is most fiercely attacking Newt Gingrich, so Mitt himself is “on,” not ”off.”

So the pun is a little “off.”

But in headlines catchy wordplay often trumps logic.

("Trumps." Get it?)

Cow-Cow-Cow Boogie

I just added to my site an entry on “cowered” and “coward.” If you think this is an unlikely misspelling, try searching for the phrase "a cowered" in Google.

When I write these entries, I try to keep them fairly minimal, but I thought I’d add a few details about this one here.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “coward” is a straightforward borrowing of Old French “couart” or “couard” and can be traced back to a word meaning “tail,” either in reference to a fearful animal tucking its tail between its legs or “turning tail.”

The OED also lists various uses of “coward” as an adjective, but these are all unusual in modern English, so I ignored them. The word has other specialized uses, including in heraldry, where it describes an image of an animal with its tail tucked between its legs.

“Cower” is listed with this etymological note:

perhaps of Norse derivation: compare Icelandic kúra to sleep, doze, Swedish kura , Danish kure , to squat; also modern German kauern to cower, of which the antecedents are unknown.

The entry for the verb “cower” also notes a rare transitive form meaning “to lower, bend down” (example: “Byron Don Juan: Canto III xxxii. 19 The patriarch of the flock all gently cowers His sober head”).

The verb “cow” is probably Nordic. The OED cites similar words in Old Norse, Norwegian, and Swedish. This seems to be the only one of the three to have been connected with the bovine species.

Then there are the few folks who refer to the playwright as “Noel Cowered.” Rare, but amusing.