Recognizing and thanking those who have helped you out along the way is always a good thing—whether in your essay research, your book writing journey, or in everyday life—but wait, how do you spell that word? “Acknowledgments” or “Acknowledgements”?
Spellcheck won’t help you. Again. Darn spellcheck.
The answer doesn’t harken back to a complex etymology story. Nope, it’s quite simple:
Why do I call this the “Words You Should Know” podcast? It’s not a lecture. The whole idea of grammar police annoys me. This is the podcast that reminds you that Ben Franklin and Kurt Cobain both influenced our modern English language, and that spelling memes deserve to be debunked. See past episodes for those details.
Today, let’s start with Franz Kafka, and if you’re thinking of the author of The Metamorphosis and having flashbacks to a story about a man transformed into a giant cockroach-like bug, your mind is in the right place. One of my favorite quotes from Kafka is, “Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
What are your most intense obsessions? It’s a good question to ask yourself isn’t it? And are you following them mercilessly?
You know what’s weird? “Daylight Savings Time” is not the correct name for when we shift our clocks an hour back or forward, but it feels like it’s more commonly said than than the correct version, which is “Daylight Saving Time” (DST).
Did you catch the difference? It should be “Saving,” not “Savings.”
Whether you’re creating your succession plan or your secession plan, it’s good to think it through—yes, even with your spelling.
Even the best of ideas can fall through without the right attention to detail. Maybe you’ve learned that the hard way. Maybe you’ve learned it by a typo hitting you in the face. (This is absolutely one that can do that.)
David Bowie might have steered us wrong on this one, folks. And I suppose “steering” is a part of the problem. When distinguishing between “maze” vs. “labyrinth,” some sources argue that these words are synonyms, but it’s important to note that many others do not.
Yep, some word comparisons are simpler than others, and this is one where there remains some disagreement. Or if not “disagreement,” we can frame this as “everyday use” vs. “pro-level word savvy.”
I have dreams of someday someone opening up my grammar book and saying, “dude, that’s sick,” with “sick” meaning awesome. If they said, “it’s [sic],” I’d be super bummed. So bummed I would “sick” or “sic” a dog after them? No. That seems a bit over the top, don’t you think? But I needed to see how else to get these words into the story.
You probably never realized how complicated “sick” vs. “sic” could be.
People surround us. Words surround us. The words we use for people surround us. And things can get tricky.
We might fall into traps of not knowing better with some words, like “gypsy,” which is often considered a racial slur to people of the Roma population—along with the word “gyped,” as in “I was gyped,” which stems from this “gypsy” word. So, hint on that, it’s one you probably want to cut from your vocabulary.
I could go way, way deeper on language that offends—clearly—but what got me started on this concept of words for groups is the word “hipster.” Some words are cooler than cool, and this is one of them. Hipster. And is it related to hippie?
Hip hip hooray. Hip. Hep. Let’s get excited, folks. This is the Words You Should Know podcast, Season 3, Episode 5.
I find it fascinating when typos are so common that online stores consider them and can redirect these mistakes to what you actually need. Maybe home improvement stores do this with spigots already when someone searches for a “spicket,” but what’s gotten my attention lately is the mistake of “manila” vs. “vanilla” folders.
Do you know what they are actually called?
A few stolen minutes out of your day to talk words and communication, because Ben Franklin and Kurt Cobain both influenced our modern English language and spelling memes deserve to be debunked. Words. Language. Human communication. Everything begins there.
Norrie Epstein once said, “The best writing advice I ever received: facts are eloquent.” Oh how much I love this statement. It’s true in conversations, in books, in journalism, and anywhere words might take you. Sometimes, these facts are world changing. Sometimes, these facts are word-changing—or, at least in how you perceive certain uses of language.
Are you ready to dive in? I have two big questions for you today.
If a “happy meal” once made you excited as a kid, would a “peace meal” make you excited as a grown up? “Happy” is good, but “peace” is a larger group undertaking. I know it’s not that simple, but I like the idea of a “peace meal,” even if this isn’t the actual spelling of the word.
What are we actually talking about?
To do something bit by bit. To do it in pieces.