Another instalment in: Words that we use incorrectly because they just “sound” better. A while back I wrote about the misuse of “penultimate” by people trying to sound erudite and eloquent by using it to convey “more than ultimate,” which is impossible. The latest misuse getting under my skin is “fulsome” as an adjective applied …
Category Archives: Word Play
Quantitative Precision – Less vs Fewer / Amount vs Number
It’s not so much that people get tripped up by the different terms used to quantify things; speakers and even writers of Canadian English increasingly default to one term, and have either forgotten or do not bother with the precision available in our language. Perhaps people just don’t like the way it sounds—“fewer”—sounds like “ewww.” …
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Reclaiming Our Words #1 – The Pejorative “Princess”
“He’s a bit of a princess.” The owner was describing his slightly neurotic male Weimaraner to a few of us at the dog park. The juxtaposition of these opposing gendered terms stuck in my auditory processing unit as I walked Frida home. I thought about the times I used the same term to describe my …
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Word of the Day – Penultimate
Word of the Day – Penultimate We humans, even those who are not Twitter-addicted former US Presidents, love our superlatives. From time to time I hear this word in the context of something being more than ultimate. Some years back, a senior Canadian Army officer, started talking about “the penultimate sacrifice.” I recently heard the …