GRAMMAR MISTAKES
G'day folks,
Time to clear up a few words that might give you grief from time to time.
FLOUT/FLAUNT
Are you
talking about showing off? Then you don’t mean flout, you mean flaunt.
To flout is to ignore the rules. You can think of flaunt as the
longer showier one, with that extra letter it goes around flaunting. You can
flout a law, agreement, or convention, but you can flaunt almost anything.
PHASE/FAZE
Phase is the more common word and
usually the right choice, except in those situations where it means “to
bother.” If something doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t faze you. Faze is
almost always used after a negative, so be on alert if there is an
isn’t/wasn’t/doesn’t nearby.
LOATH/LOATHE
Loath is reluctant or unwilling, while
to loathe is to hate. You are loath to do the things you loathe, which
makes it confusing, but you can keep them clear by noting whether the word has
a "to be" verb on one side and a to on the other (he is
loath to, I would be loath to), in which case loath
is correct, or it can be substituted by hate (I loathe mosquitoes), in
which case you need the e on the end.
WAVE/WAIVE
The word wave
is far more frequent than waive and has a more concrete meaning of
undulating motion. It’s often used for waive, "to give something
up," perhaps because it fits well with the image of someone waving
something away. But when you waive your rights, or salary, or contract terms,
you surrender them. You can think of the extra i in waive as
a little surrender flag in the middle of the word.
INTENSIVE PURPOSES
Intensive is a word that means strong or
extreme, but that’s not what’s called for in this phrase. To say
“practically speaking” or “in all important ways” the phrase you want is “for
all intents and purposes.”
GAUNTLET/GAMUT
Run the
gauntlet and run
the gamut are both correct, but mean different things. Running the gauntlet
was an old type of punishment where a person was struck and beaten while
running between two rows of people. A gamut is a range or spectrum. When
something runs the gamut, it covers the whole range of possibilities.
PEEK/PEAK
This pair
causes the most trouble in the phrase sneak peek where the spelling from
sneak bleeds over to peek, causing it to switch meaning from
"a quick look" to "a high point." If you imagine the two Es
as a pair of eyes, it can help you remember to use peek for the looking
sense.
FORTUITOUS
Fortuitous means by chance or accident.
Because of its similarity to fortunate, it is commonly used to refer to
a lucky accident, but it need not be. Having lightning strike your house and
burn it down is not a lucky event, but according to your insurance company it
will be covered because it is fortuitous, or unforeseen.
REFUTE
To refute
a claim or an argument doesn’t just mean to offer counterclaims and opposing
arguments. That would be to respond or rebut. To refute is
to prove that a claim is false. If you refute, the disagreement should be over
because you’ve won. If someone accuses you of not having paid for something,
you refute the accusation by producing the receipt.
Clancy's comment: I hope you have printed this off and plastered it on the wall of your office ... With all the other important tid bits.
I'm ...
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