h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Mine's a yard of ale!

Green does resemble common when applied to Glasgow Green, a bit of common land or park, grassed over. However, the area between the houses where clothing would be hung to dry is called a drying green and, if you live in tenements, can be very small indeed and communal. Basically any stretch of grass can fall under the term green. Also counts for bowling greens and, into old obscure sports, quoiting greens too.

My milkman just left me a note saying "Thank you for your costume throughout the year."

I got a mail today about a database failure that said "how can we insure this never happens again?"

Gnomon, do you often answer the door dressed as a Viking?

At least he'd be dressed then, could be worse

[bookmarking] and [wishing you all a hiccy Chrimbo ]

Ben

That ensure/insure mistake is depressingly common. There are one or two others that I can't quite recall, but will look out for: I seem to get at least one a day in e-mail. They all stem from simple ignorance of the meanings.

I used to mind the disinterested/uninterested one, too, but have become so used to it I almost don't notice any more.

Other really common ones are confusion over -able/-ible and -ant/-ent.

Oh don't get me going about ant/ent! I never really noticed that one till I discovered h2g2 and found myself constintly gulping at all the UK varients and inconsistent spellings.

*wave to a fancifully costumed Gnomon *
You still have Milkmen in Ireland , that alone may be reason enough to return to homeland. We've got supermarkets. 'You want milk, you go and get it, period, full stop.'


~j~

...or you can avail yourself of the supermarket's home delivery service.

No such animal round here, Myc. There is no profit in delivery services, hence, no delivery services.
The elderly, other shut-ins and the vehicularly challenged would just starve without taxis and good samaritans.
When I was a boy we had bread, eggs, veg, milk.. all brought round daily in horse drawn wagons.
Now we have to import manure for our gardens. And drive to the supermarket to buy it.
Sorry, way off topic.

jwf

manolan,

I guess the most common I see must be the affect/effect one.


On a different subject,
what about the roots of pretext and pretense? Of similar meaning I know know, but gets me is that they both look like they're made up of a prefix and a word, I.e pre-tense and pre-text but that explanation doesn't agree with their current meaning, so is it just a coincidence that they look like they are made up of prefix and word or is something else going on here ?

Just like prefix looks like it is made up of pre and fix?
Erk, I've just confused and worried myself now.

hi Ictoan,

You are quite right to assume that both words are made up of a prefix and whatever the main bit is called.

Personally, I don't consider them interchangeable in Brit English. Others may, I don't really know.

What do you mean by 'that explanation doesn't agree with their current meaning'?

By the way, you can find quite a bit of info on this kind of thing with any good dictionary. Chambers usually gives you some indication of the origin of the word (unless they don't know! In which case, it is probably a tricky one. ). If you go straight to the end of the definition, just before it passes on to the next word, that is where the etymological details will probably be. It may work differently with other dicos, of course.

I don't mean this to sound patronising at all. I just thought since you are obviously interested in this kind of thing, it might be handy info.

Here's some of the lowdown on these two words from Chambers (slightly abridge coz I had to type it out!):


Pretense; an act of pretending, something pretended, allegation, aim, purpose, appeareancne or show t hide reality, a false allegation, a pretext, a claim

Latin, praetendere; -tendere, -tensum, to stretch (in front)


Pretext; an ostensible motive or reason, put forward as excuse or to conceal the true one

praetextus; from praetexere, textus, - to weave in front, border

So, there you have it, you were right.

Thanks for sending me off on a very informative journey through my dictionary, hope the results help. Btw, I also had a look under 'text' just to make sure that it was the same 'weave' origin. Of course, it is; just like textile. I just never thought of text as 'woven words' before. Thanks for that.

Seeya
Spiff

Yes, Ictoan. I had just seen an example of affect/effect and came to post, but you had beaten me to it. This one really winds me up.

Hi Spiff, thanks, as ever , for the enlightenment. Guess to late to ask for the dictionary for christmas! Family would all look at me funny as well (actually, they do that anyway!).

I didn't mean I thought them interchangeable, just that they had a kind of similarity, erm, tries to think of example, both have an allusion to doing one thing in order to do another more secret or covert thing.

By not agreeing with their meaning, I meant, for example, that a pretext would literally be the text that came before something and a pretense would be the tense that came before something.

Oh, and I guess you can add assure to the insure/ensure thing as that seems to get used interchangeably as well, although it is less common.

Woof!

Even more common than affect/effect is loose/lose. There can't be a single thread on H2G2 which does not have liberal helpings of the word "loose" but 90% of the time, the writers mean "lose".

Perhaps we should campaign, but the rest of the site thinks we're geeks anyway, so it may not carry any weight.

TC - not a "loose" woman

As someone who could never ( I have tried! ) understand the diff between affect and effect I have simply given up on it.
Even at the peak of my pedantry all I could remember was that 'affectation' started with an 'a' so 'affected' meant to 'act' ..pretentiously.
The opposite of 'acting' is the techie thing called 'special effects'. Somehow there must be a connexion. That was as far as I ever got.
So I will apologise now, for all past and future crimes, since I will no doubt continue to screw those two up. It's beyond my ken!
Strangely, this gives me some insight into the minds of those who commit all those other crimes against grammar. And from this insider's perspective I can assure you they do not grow lesser every day or much care.

~jwf~

Here in the US another mixup is the fewer/less issue. People here can't seem to figure out the difference, and it drives me up the wall! They'll say "we have less problems now." not "less problems!" FEWER problems! AAAh!

-Strider