Sometimes, one word feels like another, just spoken with an accent. Add a Southern drawl to “desperate” and it sounds like “disparate,” right? But that doesn’t help our situation much—and hey, I’m from the American South, so it’s not a knock on Southerners, y’all.
Here’s what you need to know when spellcheck simply refuses to help you:
- “Desperate” means having an extreme hopelessness and/or frustration, leading to a feeling of absent possibilities. When all feels lost, you might feel desperate. The noun forms of “desperate” are “desperation” and “despair.”
- “Disparate” means different in all ways. Hot colors and cool colors are disparate from each on a paint palette, and beliefs—clearly—can be disparate too. The noun form of “disparate” is “disparity.”
Say them again and again, back and forth, and your own tongue will surely deceive you, but you can get this right.
The Latin word desperatus, meaning “haven given up,” is the origin of “desperate,” and the Latin word disparare, meaning “to divide or separate,” is the origin of “disparate.”
Should we despair at the lack of disparity between these two words? No, even though you might stumble across a usage of “disparately,” which is indeed the rarely-used adverb form of “disparate,” which so closely resembles “desperately,” the adverb form of “desperate.” Sigh.
As for how many times my own fingers slipped and I typed one word instead of the other even in crafting this blog, I’ll let that remain a mystery. I’ll just add a quick reminder about the power of taking time with the words we say and the words that trickle out of our fingertips onto our keyboards.
Happy writing, folks.
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