ista verba non significare mihi videtur quod opinaris, seu, ista non quae verba quaeris sunt

English can be considered a particularly difficult language for many reasons. Homonyms especially often fall victim to those who know what they want to say but don’t quite know how to say it. As annoying as it can be to mentally correct the torturous little things while reading, I personally find it much more distracting when an author uses a word that looks like - but isn’t - the one he wants, not because the word he puts down sounds the same and he fails to catch the error, but because the author genuinely believes the word he’s using means what he wants it to mean rather than what it actually does. Hence the title of the post: “I don’t think those words mean what you think [they mean], or Those are not the words you’re looking for.”

It’s one thing to misspell a word, sometimes nearly beyond recognition, but it’s quite another to end up with a completely different word. The most prevalent example of this may actually be homonyms such as “it’s”/“its” and “you’re”/“your”, but there are plenty of frequently confused non-homonyms to be found, especially (and, I must admit, somewhat understandably) on the web. Sure, it can be humorous (albeit painful) to read that someone “drug” something or someone along [“drug” can be a verb, but it is never a form of the verb “drag”], or about heroic reactions in the face of “eminent danger” [if your particular danger is threatening but not exactly high society, you’ll probably want to go with “imminent” instead]. The most common mix-ups of this type seem to occur between two words that differ only by a letter: breath(e), loath(e), aid(e), moral(e), rational(e), lo(o)se, cho(o)se, etc. Usually they’re pronounced differently enough that they aren’t considered homonyms - except, I suppose, to those who don’t know how to pronounce them in the first place.

Sometimes, however, the words aren’t quite so close. Most recently, I came across someone’s attempt to play on the word “behold” by citing the relevant proverb (“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”) and going on to say that a particular person was thus “beholden”. While this particular example gets at the difficulty of English conjugations, it also happens to show how a potentially effective bit of wordplay can be completely undermined by choosing the wrong word. (It’s true that “beholden” was originally the past participle of “behold”, but in the sense that this particular author means it is obsolete.) “Beheld” would have done the job equally well while being far more palatable to us grammar Nazis gurus.

One of my particular pet peeves is “defiantly” for “definitely”. There are two reasons that mix-ups like this one really get me. The first is that they make the author seem careless, as if he had found a word in the dictionary (or online, or both) that looked similar to the word he had in mind and assumed it to be the right one without bothering to pronounce it mentally or aloud. The second is that they make the author seem careless twice over, since he clearly didn’t bother to proofread his work or to ask someone else to do so.

Don’t get me wrong - everyone makes mistakes like these, however occasionally and however briefly. It’s inevitable, and I won’t pretend otherwise. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that I’ve probably committed such an error at some point. What is avoidable, and to be avoided at all costs, is letting errors like these go uncorrected, either out of ignorance or out of carelessness. They not only cause careful readers mental distress, but they often also ruin otherwise enjoyable writing.