

Common Solecisms - Words you are almost certainly using incorrectly - smanek
http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=673903

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subwindow
I freaking hate prescriptive linguistics. The people who love to prescribe are
so often prescribing incorrectly. I couldn't get past the first one in this
article:

> Acronym: this is a word, like radar or NATO, not a set of initials, like the
> BBC or the IMF.

Wikipedia:

> In 1943, Bell Laboratories coined the term acronym as the name for a word
> (such as SONAR) created from the first letters of each word in a series of
> words (such as SOund Navigation And Ranging). The terms initialism and
> alphabetism are neither widely used nor widely known. The term acronym is
> widely used to describe any abbreviation formed from initial letters.

First off, the word was created by a _corporation_ ; secondly, the term is
widely used and understood to apply to words like "BBC" ("Three Letter
Acronym"); thirdly, the "correct" alternative is not widely used or
understood. So if you use the correct terms your communication would actually
be _less_ clear, which is, as I understand, the point of studying
grammar/linguistics in the first place.

For more on this exciting subject, see David Foster Wallace's excellent
"Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage":

<http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html>

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hyperbovine
I agree.

That said, "performant" is not, has never been, and will never be a word.

(This is not directed at you, parent poster, but I see that .. group of
letters .. crop up all the time in HN stories and comments)

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IsaacSchlueter
_That said, "performant" is not, has never been, and will never be a word._

Well, it's certainly Not A Duck.

It's pronounceable, it has a widely accepted spelling and definition… Seems
like a word to me. Time to get over it, I think.

~~~
arebop
Does it mean "fast" or "efficient" or something else? Both those words are
shorter and more widely understood.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
It means that something "performs well". The specific criteria of performance
depends on context.

Both "fast" and "efficient" are more specific than performant, but are related
concepts. Note that "speed" and "efficiency" are also often related, but not
quite the same thing. They fill a different linguistic need.

Performant is pretty widely understood, in my experience.

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adw
This is swimming upstream given the progress of the thread, but I loved this.

It's an opinionated style guide. If you disagree, that's of course fine - and
part of the reason I liked it, I suspect, was that it fits well with my own
idiolect - but there's a distinction to be drawn between _language_ (non-
prescriptive) and _style_ (which you can be as prescriptive about as you
like).

One of the best aspects of the Economist is its style; both of its prose and
its design. Its politics I can take or leave, but at least it's honest about
where it stands.

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10ren
"English is what English-speaking people speak." "Correct" English is a
different matter - it serves no higher purpose than to keep you in your place.

I would like to see a guide that gives compelling reasons for how each rule
increases clarity. George Orwell's guide comes to mind:
<http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html>

_A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the
outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is
insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims,
one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a
cuttlefish spurting out ink._

Wikipedia summary:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langua...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language#Causes_and_characteristics_of_unclear_writing)

~~~
jrockway
_"Correct" English is a different matter - it serves no higher purpose than to
keep you in your place._

Using incorrect language, however, makes whatever you are writing about seem
less thought-out or even just plain wrong.

Have you ever read 4chan? You can argue that that's English, since it's
English speakers using the English language... but you will surely agree that
their version of English makes them look like uneducated morons, even without
considering what they are trying to say.

Anyway, the style guide here suggests that authors use the clearest word to
describe a given situation or quality. I don't see anything wrong with this --
clarity is always good. (Your writing could still be understandable without
using the words correctly, but _why_ use incorrect words just because some
other people are also wrong?)

~~~
twopoint718
The thing that comes to mind here is the notion of a "controlled vocabulary"
from library science. When you're building a hierarchical model of concepts
(Library of Congress, or Dewey Decimal Classification) it helps to have a
relatively small and consistent set of identifiers so that you can
consistently refer to the same thing.

I think of good English usage as being similar. When what you mean is X, use
the word for X. So these sorts of lists of usage can be thought of as a
mapping from concepts to words.

English is dynamic, true, but you have to remember that when you talk about
"English is what English speakers speak" I think you have to also consider, to
avoid a grave disservice to history, that "English speakers" mean not only
those walking around today, but all the vast collection of written words
through the ages.

~~~
10ren
Nice point. It's backcompatibility with legacy uses ( _use_ is a synonym for
_application_.) And so the familiar battle between current usage and
backcompatibility plays itself out in this arena, with the familiar casualties
of irregular special cases, unconceived foundations and unretractable
experiments.

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magoghm
"Anarchy means the complete absence of law or government. It may be harmonious
or chaotic." I was glad to read that. I'm so tired of people who believe that
anarchy implies chaos.

~~~
hyperbovine
I'm so tired of people who insist that it doesn't.

~~~
twopoint718
"Anarchy" (the word) isn't a political argument, it just means "an-" without,
"-arkhos" leader.

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boredguy8
"Gender is a word to be applied to grammar, not people. If someone is female,
that is her sex, not her gender. (The gender of Mädchen, the German word for
girl, is neuter, as is Weib, a wife or woman.)"

That's doing some pretty hard core identity theory without a license. What
would Judith Butler say?

~~~
randallsquared
That's not identity theory; it's just a definition. That said, you can use
"gender" in situations where using "sex" would cause uncomfortable atmosphere,
correctly or no, so there's no way we're getting that distinction back.

~~~
Semiapies
There's another context: gender can mean the psychological and social aspect
of sexual identification. I believe that's what the "identity-theory" bit
refers to.

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jorgem
My favorite: Actionable

It used to mean: "affording grounds for legal action" -- that is you can be
sued for it.

Now, marketing folks (and politicians) use it to mean "something they can do".

~~~
jfarmer
To me actionable means "something I can act upon," not necessarily something I
can do, e.g., a specific piece of information that makes the next decision
obvious.

If I meant "something I can do" I'd say "possible."

~~~
jorgem
That's just my point. It doesn't mean that.

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jfarmer
If it means that to me and everyone else who uses the word in the same way,
how can it not "mean that?" Because that's not what's in the dictionary?
Because that's not what someone who lived 100, 50, 25 years ago would have
meant when they said it?

I don't buy it. Language is defined by its usage, not the other way around. If
I say "actionable" and everyone understands what I mean by it -- yourself
included, if only begrudgingly -- then what does it mean if not the thing
which everyone understands?

~~~
jorgem
Maybe you misunderstood the words in my answer because they didn't mean what
you think you read...

You are free to redefine the meaning of any word you want. But that's what the
article was about -- misusing words.

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xiaoma
>Appeal is intransitive nowadays (except in America), so appeal against
decisions.

Americans make up 67% of the world's native English speakers!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_dialects1997_modif...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_dialects1997_modified.svg)

Furthermore, second language learners get far more exposure to Hollywood and
US television than they do to RP or whatever the Economist considers to be
"standard" language. I can respect their pride in their language, but
American, or more accurately North American English, is more than some
minority dialect. It's the defacto world standard.

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nailer
"Aggression is an unattractive quality, so do not call a keen salesman an
aggressive one (unless his foot is in the door or beyond)."

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - there are no supporting arguments for
the idea that aggression is always unattractive. Like much of the rest of the
article this is also prescriptive.

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rgrieselhuber
Educational but I think some of these proscriptions are a little stodgy. For
example, I know what "alibi" really means but the usage of the word has
expanded to conveniently include more explanations than only proven ones,
because it is typically used in situations of alleged guilt over some crime.

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latortuga
I knew that if I read long enough I'd find some error and I surely did: "Thus
a dilemma offers the choice between two alternatives, each with equally nasty
consequences." The department of redundancy department seems to have written
about the two alternatives.

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jongraehl
I don't see any error.

~~~
latortuga
The definition of 'alternative' in the article is "strictly, this is one of
two, not one of three, four, five or more" and as such, the phrase 'two
alternatives' is unnecessary.

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Semiapies
Many of these are perfectly good points, and others are stylistically pleasing
(like the "don't _get_ a verb, verb it" one), but some are just strange,
particularly the hostility to metaphors and other figures of speech
("epicenter" and "bellwether").

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ighost
Agreed. Not only that, but a literal epicenter isn't even necessarily
underground.

Any geologists care to chime in on this one?

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ars
Worth reading, but note that it has a slight british slant, and some of the
words are different in the US. (For example a Keen salesman.)

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ivankirigin
This begs the question, when are people going to stop misusing that horrible
phrase?

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stcredzero
_Aggression is an unattractive quality_

In certain delineated contexts, it is most certainly attractive, as my
girlfriend would attest. It's unattractive if it leaks. One could argue that
it's not true aggression, unless it is so.

 _Autarchy vs. Autarky_

Good one!

