Oh  yes,  to all of those above!!   but what about when  people spell the same word differently?   Like,  we  in  USA  spell the word  RUMOR  as  such;  but  some people spell it  Rumour.   Which is correct?   No  offense to anyone,  but I am just curious.  Theater  is  spelled like theatre   in the old days...just an example.

Glancing over that list, I see only a few spellings that have become the standard -- we do use fetus (instead of foetus), gram (gramme), catalog (catalogue), mold (mould), donut (optional for doughnut), hiccup (hiccough), center (centre), and meter (metre).

But actually, I think it was Noah  Webster (of dictionary fame) who got spelling simplification started over here a hundred years earlier, circa 1800.  A lot of his ideas failed to catch on, but a fair number of them are with us to this day -- Wikipedia lists defense (rather than defence), center (centre), traveler (traveller), color and favor (colour, favour), and wagon (waggon).

As to which spellings are correct -- that depends on which country you're in!

Thanks for starting this thread, Wholocked!

Ah yes, effect vs affect. I still get them confused. There are other words that are like those - although apparently my morning coffee hasn't kicked in yet because I'm having a total mental blank on what they are.

The other thing that irritates me in this time of Twitter & SMS conversations is that constructing whole sentences, with capitalisation and punctuation, seems to have gone the way of the dodo. I've heard of people sending work-related emails in text-speak. EW.

Edit: Missed a comma in my sentence about punctuation. That just won't do!

Last edited by Wholocked (September 19, 2012 12:26 am)

Hehe I noticed it too Kazza

Those words I was thinking about earlier came to me today and then I forgot again! ARGH

A lot of people write 'alot'; but it should be 'a lot'.  I always have trouble with 'affect' and 'effect'and have to check it almost every time. And many times I find myself adding an apostrophe to 'its' when I shouldn't.

My 6th grade teacher used to get furious if anyone said "snuck" - such as, "The theives snuck in through the window".  He said there was no such word and that to be correct it should be 'sneaked'.  Losing battle I'm afraid. 'Snuck' seems to be in popular usage and I do see it in the dictionary.

'lesser' vs. 'fewer'
'lie' vs.'lay'
'who' vs. 'whom'
i.e vs. e.g

The list goes on and on....

What gets me is when people use "less" when they should use "fewer."

Example: Susie has three apples and Bobby has five apples. Susie doesn't have less apples, she has fewer, dumbass.

First off, can y'all tell me whether "I couldn't care less" is a standard expression anywhere except the US?  (Just in case it's strictly American, it means, "It would be literally impossible for me to care any less than I do now, because I already don't care even a tiny bit" -- or in fewer words, "I don't care.")

Anyhow, the typical American pronunciation of "couldn't" is more like "could'n" -- and then a lot of people kind of swallow the "n" so that it's difficult to tell the difference between "could" and "couldn't" when spoken.  Which presumably explains the current trend toward saying "I could care less"  -- which doesn't even make sense.

Even though I can understand the mechanism for this misunderstanding -- why can't people just think?

The phrase is also a standard English phrase. Since the Catherine Tate show there is a tendency to just say, 'bovvered?'

The dropping of the final, and often central 'T' sound of words is very, very common where I live. People will correct children, as an example, by saying, 'Sound your Ts'. Another common trait is to put a K sound instead of a G sound at the end of words and an F instead of a V e.g. 'Nufink' instead of 'nothing'. It is also common to drop the H sound at the start of words e.g. ' 'aven' ' rather than 'haven't'. The final T is replaced by that strange glottal stop type 'swallowing' as you have mentioned. This happens in the middle of words such as 'water' which become 'wa'er'. That's our short linguistics lesson for today.

"Carol the Dabbler" wrote:

My current "favorite" is "free reign" as a substitute for "free rein."  I suspect there are two reasons -- one, "reign" kind of makes sense -- and two, not many people these days have ever laid the reins loosely across old Dobbin's neck and trusted him to head for home.

Reign, rein, rain.  That can be a tough one, even for native speakers, although most of us would not misuse rain, I presume.