If you’re doing lots of naval-gazing, maybe you’re missing a sailor or maybe you’re a spy. But I’m guessing it might just be a typo if you’re writing about excessive introspection.
“Navel-gazing,” meaning the contemplation of your own thoughts, concerns, and existence (often to a self-absorbed degree), was first used in 1959, but oh, the spelling confusion since then.
You’ve heard it said, but do you know how to spell it?
This is another case of the English language being funky and you over-thinking your knowledge of the the nick of time, knots, gnats, and other words with spellings that sound like they should simply begin with the letter “n.”
When local television news viewers start calling out meteorologists on their weather-specific grammar, you know people are in that end-of-winter, dark, gloomy, living-in-their-long-johns state of mind. Allow me to come to the defense of on-air weather personalities everywhere to say that “bitter cold” and “bitterly cold” are both correct.
However, there is a difference to be aware of.
Often, when I’m giving workshops, a hand raises into the air with a great question. Oftentimes, it’s a question that makes me pause and think.
Recently, the question was this: If we should try to make the most of our words and tighten superfluous language, why would you say “oftentimes” instead of just “often”?
It was a fabulous question, one I didn’t immediately have the answer to.
Who is this Nick we speak of? He must be a time-traveler. No, that doesn’t sound right. It must be “knick of time,” right? Right?
Wrong.
Sometimes our brains want to over-complicate things, believing the simple answer can’t be right and that it must be something more profound. In this vein, I’ve seen “nick of time” written a number of ways—“knick of time” and even “gnick of time” among them. However, plain old “nick” is the correct form for this idiom.
Itty bitty, tiny little hiccups in our writing might not always be noticed, but that doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t try to do better—even when some people say these mistakes are okay.
There’s a strategy for being patient and waiting for something difficult to pass, and then there’s falling down after your golf ball lands in a sand trap. Which one do you mean?
The expression you’re looking for is to “hunker down.” To “bunker down” is not actually a thing.
If you think saying “ye olde” makes things sound colonial and quaint, maybe you don’t want to hear that you’re mispronouncing it.
Yikes. Who’s guilty of this?
I know I have been.
If your buddy is “lit,” he’s either drunk or he’s wearing a light-up Christmas sweater. If he’s “lighted,” I suppose you know intoxication is out of the question, but is there a difference otherwise? Should you be worried about flares of flame?
The difference between “lighted” and “lit” is a question that comes up fairly frequently, and people are always looking for the simple answer.
Witty satire can be many things—ridiculous, hilarious, poignant, and even brutal—but the one thing it’s not is a part-man, part-goat creature of the wood.
There is no alternate spelling of “satire” that makes it cleverer or more in line with its roots. You might be able to spell “theater” as “theatre” in the English language, but “satire” is never the same thing as “satyr.”