Sunday, August 26, 2007

spelling reminders

definite, not definate
separate, not seperate
weird, not wierd
reMUNerate, not reNUMerate
ENmity, not EMnity (think enemy, not indemnity)

And while some people pronounce it "miss-chee-vee-uss," the spelling is nonetheless mischievous. No "i" after the "v."

And a quick punctuation reminder: if you're American, keep your period inside the closing quotation mark, as you see above. If you're British or from a country that uses British English as the standard, feel free to continue doing "this".

Thank you.



UPDATE: Jelly correctly notes in the comments that "reNUMerate" means to count again. Yes, but I hope it was obvious that I was pointing out the very common mistake many people make when they use "renumerate" in reference to pay. Almost nobody uses "renumerate" when they can say "re-count" (here hyphenated to distinguish it from "recount," as in "carefully recount the events"). Googlefight stats here show the relative occurrences of the two words online.


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1 comment:

  1. Hi Spelling Wizard!

    It's reNUMerate if you mean "to count over" though, heh?

    I've got to renumerate my remuneration.

    ReplyDelete

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