Today:


I tend to be a wordsmith. That being the times when I actually tend to work with words. Lately, I haven’t felt the inspiration to write or as Mr. Brian O’Bannion would put it, “court the muse.”

My parent’s are wordsmiths and I still have a handy little book that my father gave me while in the third grade entitled, 30,000 Words. No definitions. Just 30,000 Words and the syllabication or pronunciations. It was in this book that I learned the word impetuous.

One day on the way home from school my mother put the back window down on the Vista Cruiser station wagon and asked me to climb out and grab the mail from the box. I had only reached into the mailbox when she suddenly lurched forward causing me to lose my balance. I yelled out, “Stop the car, you impetuous thing!” She found it amusing while I was furious. I wanted to know why she was laughing at what was to me a very dangerous situation. It turned out that what she found amusing was the fact that I had almost used the word impetuous correctly.

This brings me to today. I hate it when obviously knowing people use words incorrectly. I have a few pet peeves, pacifically when they mean specifically or satistic when they mean statistic, etc. I assume they are unable to pronounce the mouthful of letters correctly in a short time. A common mistake but used incorrectly over a period of time I assume they just don’t know the difference. Maybe their parents used the words incorrectly and it has just been stuck as the default.


Sometimes, I find the misuse to be a colloquial thing. One person will say it and then the person they were talking to will say it and so on and so on. Supposably that is what’s happening. Which brings me to todays odd pronunciation, supposably. Someone I work with always says supposably. I wince and carry on. Then the other day I ran into another person who used the word supposably. Not once but numerous times within a short conversation. I winced and carried on.

I assumed it was just one of those things where the spoken word morphs into the actual word and before you know it that word becomes the official definition in the dictionary. I counted on the autocorrect function of my word processor to find the mistake. To my surprise, Supposedly and Supposably were both real words. WHAT? I reached for the little 30,000 Words book and found it to be true. How can this be? I thought it was some local verbal virus working its way through the population. I googled the words with the dubious suspicion that you get when looking up something on Wikipedia and found that supposably means, “it is possible to suppose.” Whereas supposedly means, “according to what is generally assumed or believed.

In almost every case the person using the word supposably would have meant to use the word supposedly if they only knew the difference. I wince and carry on then sometimes laugh because they almost got it right.

21 comments:

  1. I agree and concur.

    My beef is Hanged and Hung. People are hanged by the neck until dead. If a man is hung by the neck, then he is going to be very much in demand.

    My other beef is when people use lay when they mean lie, and the improper use of "laid" when they mean a person is placed upon something. If the victim was laid on the stretcher, then the stretcher becomes the place where coitus took place.

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    1. Hanged has a certain appeal. In person he is, "Hung."
      Once he gets away he was, "Hanged."
      "Damn he was hanged and he lied my on the stretcher."

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    2. Between thinking about Cookie's beef and yours, my head is spinning.

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    3. It's been a long Winter! You are going Cabin Crazy.You must try to think of a macho heterosexual of which I'm at a lose for in today's celebrity landscape. Perhaps Burt Reynolds from days and days ago...

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  2. Oh no... I must impetuously reprimand you for adding an apostrophe to the plural "parents" at the top of the second paragraph. (It only jumps out because of its proximity to not one, but two uses of the term "wordsmith") ;-) Irregardless (which was my father's pet peeve word) I always love your blog!

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    1. I know. I'm a master at words and that has served me well where bullies are concerned. They tend to not mess with me for the fear of an unleashed durential (see below) storm of hateful carefully chosen words.

      I got the words but my mechanics of punctuation are dreadful. The same person who uses the word supposably winces then carries on when I comma splice.

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  3. Excellent post!

    I used to write and edit technical documents. Typos and misspellings didn't bother me. But usage mistakes did. Like your/you're, there/their/they're, i.e./e.g., lose/loose, passive voice.

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    1. I don't get bothered by misspellings either. I've seen all of us commenting on posts where we are in a hurry and miss an edit. Like the the or leave a verb out. I've seen tests where they intentionally leave out letters of words and you just automatically fill in the blanks but leaving out key words like verbs can mess it up.

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  4. excellent story, vista cruiser and all!

    i worked with a girl (whose brother was a best selling author, ahem, typist) who always said supposably. another favorite of hers was durential, as in rain. i liked this one, if it was meant to mean a lot of rain for a long period of time. she had others, i've forgotten them, i'm old.

    though not the same thing, a pet peeve of mine here in minnesota is how people incorrectly use lend & borrow. scads do. "he borrowed me five dollars." i never keep still when i hear this.

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    1. Well, I guess she learned you! I'm going to use durential the next time we have a flash flood. Then I'm going to the bank and get lended some monies.

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  5. The Baltimore Sun has been "pleaded" when "pled" is the correct option.

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    1. I'm pledding with the jury not to convict my punctuation arrows.

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  6. That's nothing; a "reporter" in the San Francisco "newspaper" used "inferred" when he meant "implied." at least, that's what I inferred.

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    1. I'm still mad with that newspaper for inferring in my obituary that I was interred when I was actually embalmed and entombed.

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    2. And yet you look so peaceful.

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    3. did my spray of gladioli arrive on time?

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    4. How did you know that gladiolias are my favorite flowers?

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    5. @MJ-They did a good job. Not too much Grecian formula. Skin not too waxy.

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  7. I would never dream of saying "supposably" even your comment box doesn't like it and has underlined the word in red. The odd times words like being/been catches me out and I have to live with the shame and some plurals, is it penises or peni? What gets my goat is the use of the glottal stop, I could hiss like a cat when I hear words like 'party' pronounced as 'Par EE', I recently bought a few items from a shop in town and the total came to £18.40 I shall not try to reproduce the pronunciation, as I shall more than likely end up with frayed nerves.

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    1. "A-EEN-FOUR-EE"

      I have a girlfriend from Buffalo New York. I could never nor shall I ever try to reproduce her accent. But, she's been in the South for twenty years now and thinks she knows her way around a Southern accent. It's horrible to hear it especially when she tries to do my Mother whom she has never met. She comes off sounding like Scarlet O'Hara which my Mother's accent has nothing in common. When she does a British accent she sounds like a fool. It's bad! She uses the "glottal stop" in every word like she thinks a Cockney accent sounds.

      I've told her that unless she grew up in a regional dialect that she should never try to do this as someone from that area will invariably call you out for the fraud you are.

      I HATE WHEN PEOPLE TRY TO DO A SOUTHERN ACCENT!

      I REALLY HATE IT!

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    2. Oh fiddle de dee! They're just as pretentious over here, a friend of mine recently went to New York for a long weekend and came back with an American accent, using words such as bathroom and cell phone. Do you think your friend would be able to understand this scrubber from Liverpool ?

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