9,470,000 people think 'definitely' is spelt 'definately'

Or maybe half of them are just typos.

I don't know why, but this particular common mis-spelling, above all others I can think of apart from maybe "seperate", makes my skin crawl and makes me want to throw a fucking great dictionary at the culprit. JUST LEARN THE FUCKING SPELLING!

Actually, let me try something...

yeah, might have bloody known:

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,760,000 for "should of". (0.82 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 142,000,000 for "should have". (0.93 seconds)

actually, that's a slightly less depressing ratio than the "definately" one.

er, never?

If spelling is basically use

if monkeys are basically dolphins. if cheese is basically fish. if logic is basically fucked. etc.

enrique OTM. millions would bring back capital punishment. are you really suggesting that existing orthographical rules should be changed because a few ppl can't type propprl,yy oNn the internets?

(x-post)

people be morans.

the scholar says "the world is sound"
the sceptic questions that

the scholar says "the sceptic's wrong"
the sceptic calls him "fool"

how easily they could get along
if scholars just skipped school

GET ONE DICTIONARY

Your not wrong their

Ho ho ho...

Well, spelling is basically use. We don't have an academy handing down 'correct' spellings to the masses like the French. Sure, there are dictionaries, lots of different ones, none with any sort of 'official' authority. Some prefer American spellings, some even prefer Australian variations.

Spelling changes. If you don't believe me, go look at the original folio editions of Shakespeare for examples. Spellings have changed not because any authority deemed that they be changed but because of USE. Just as in the same way meanings change with time. So I wouldn't be at all suprised to find the OED or whatever listing 'definately' as an alternate spelling in 10 or 20 years' time.

Actually, 'masterbation' is a more egregious example. It scores 2.5 million, whereas the 'correct' spelling gets around 8 million. A quarter of the population thinks it's spelt with an 'e'.

By the way, here is a photo of me:

http://static.flickr.com/8/7324349_cdc73b081f_o.jpg

uh-huh.

True, but none of them lists "definately" YET! And it offends me sufficiently - borne of pure laziness and ignorance as it is - that I'm prepared to fight for its continuing exclusion by the power of edumacation...

okay. i bet you 50 pounds sterling that in 20 years' time, "definately" will not be listed by the OED as an alternate spelling. deal?

1) that's 50 pounds sterling in 2026 (so the equivalent of about 26 pence today, i guess).

2) actually, i'd bet another 50 pounds sterling that, er, sterling won't exist by then. but "definitely" will still definitely be the only spelling.

Not too sure. But there's an Australian English spellchecker on my version of Word.

i'm not going to accept "definate" as a spelling until people start spelling "finite" as "finate" as well.

The "derivation as authenticity marker" fallacy. I suppose you won't allow 'discomfit' unless people start spelling 'comfort' as 'comfit'.

Here are some more photos of me:

http://www.sitiosargentina.com.ar/fotos/mujeres/fotos/analia_hounie_01-ch.jpg

http://www.sitiosargentina.com.ar/fotos/mujeres/fotos/analia_hounie_03-ch.jpg

actually, that's a slightly less depressing ratio than the "definately" one.

since any instances of "should of" in a passage, should of course be wrong.

Can someone tell me an English word that's been so misspelt in say, the last century, that it's now listed as an alternative spelling?

Definately, but again, that's a slightly different thing. No one exactly calls you a moran if you run together a phrase that's usually two words.

Is your girlfriend a mermaid, perhaps?

The word I hate is the plural of bus. Both "buses" and "busses" are in the dictionary. Both look wrong.

Class. Power. Blah. Gotta luv dat King Canute tho.

Not that I don't have the Chicago Manual of Style. But I'm lazy.

(many cross posts)

No, that's a different issue, I think.

It isn't really very different from the topic at hand. When Noah Webster started writing dictionaries and spelling books, he deliberately changed his spellings of words from the normal ones, partly because he thought standard spelling wasn't standardised enough, and partly because he thought Americans should have their own distinct language to proper English.

One reason never to accept "definately" as a usable spelling = the root word is definite. Accepting "definately" would not be some open-minded democratic move -- it would just add yet another irregular construction to the English language, making it more complicated and obscure.

Actually, that'd make it one in ELEVEN people.

This argument is ridiculous. A definition of a language is the description of how it is spoken, spelt etc. Spellings do naturally follow on from what a word was originally derived from, but all sorts of pressures are going to influence the way a word is ultimately spelt. Think of the thousands of English words derived from French, whose spelling changed when the words crossed the Channel.

So you're saying the morans should dictate the very building blocks of our culture?

EVERYBODY LEARN BY NEXT MONDAY
USE THE APPROPRIATE UNICODE CHARACTERS FOR COMPUTER INPUT AS FOUND HERE:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-unicode.htm

THEN EVERYBODY CAN JUST WRITE THE WAY THEY TALK! NO MORE MISUNDERSTANDINGS.

In a word, yes. Whatever most people do will ultimately become standard, whether you like it or not. Ten percent of people use 'definately'. If it were 90 percent of people for at least a decade or so, then I think you'd have to say that this was the way the word was now spelt. It was ever thus, for pronunciation, meaning, spelling and everything else to do with language. You don't have to go too far back to see that 'shew' was once a dominant spelling, and yet now it's 'show'. Not so long ago 's' and 'f' were written the same way. Etc, etc. Things change when people's practices change.

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0300089198.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

a) cos its great and b) the last thing murray wanted was something to set English in stone. the OED is a history book, which is why it is so useful. this principle remains to this day in the organisation. the reason words dont always get in is because they are reviewed according to how much evidence of usage can be found. initially this came from a certain key corpus a la johnson, but the big change was to accept any books in print. this has now got to the stage where any words found in print, could be accepted if it was felt that there was a corresponding evidence for the length of time and breadth of usage. Murray stated that ideally he would have put in any words, including those found in speech, but noted that this would be not feasible and misleading in practice.

*whaddya mean, "proNUNCiation"? it comes from pronounce, dunnit???? so lets go with pronounciation! eh? latin? so what, why stick with spellings from latin derivations, this is english already!

essentially, the original poster is correct in that in language, words follow sounds, and that the written word desperately tries to play catch up with the spoken.

and what evidence do you have that the number of google hits yesterday for 'definately' reflects increased usage of this 'word'? since when?

But it's not 90 percent! It's probably not even 10 percent, because Google is hardly a representative sample of usage. It's a bad example at the very least.

Well, you're probably right. But it's surprising the number of people on this thread think that spelling is some kind of top-down thing, where the authorities pronounce on 'correct' spellings, which can only come from 'correct' derivations, whereas as Ambrose pointed out, it's the other way round, and books like the OED observe usage rather than pronounce on it.

(a) Just because something because common enough to be acceptable does not mean that it is a good idea. (It could become "standard" for people not to bathe, but it wouldn't smell very good.) When it comes to language, we should probably frown on changes that make things less clear or more complicated. "Definately" makes things more complicated because it's an irregular spelling; for those who know how to spell the word, it also makes text ever-so-slightly harder to read. It's a bad idea not for arbitrary language-is-set-in-stone reasons, but because it's a bad idea in practice.

(b) The dictionaries that everyday people buy -- the ones they keep in their homes -- are a very bad place for descriptive linguistics. When people pull their dictionaries off their shelves, it's rarely because they want to know how people do talk; they're going to assume themselves to know that already. They pull out their dictionaries either when they're reading above their level or when they're writing cover letters and resumes and book reports and such -- they pull them out because they want to know what the standard way of doing things is. You can write "definately" all you want, to the point of standardization, but if someone's looking it up in the dictionary it's because he or she actively wants to spell it the "right" way.

eh? no they don't! the OED isn't rewritten every time somebody makes a fucking typo, or doesn't pay enough attention at school. sure, they record neologisms and so on, but they also exist as a reference point for orthography and basic semantics.

"caught in the web of words" ... heheh. i got that as a school prize when i was ten. IIRC i wanted "the hobbit". i never bothered to read it ... i wonder if i still have it somewhere?

tombot OTM upthread. incidentally, i spent large parts of 1995 trying to install a font called TechPhonetic on various edinburgh university macintoshes so i could write my essays properly, and it sucked massively.

For a real change in usage, I think you need to have some contingent that will actually argue for the thing as a non-error -- some percentage of native speakers who genuinely think of the thing as correct and standard. (Even better if the old/original standard has started to seem wrong or stuffy or antiquated.)

a) i agree, but surely practice will follow whats easiest. it might be a painful move between one form or another, but if a newer spelling will make something more complicated, it will not gain support. we need to look more into how spelling follows speech (as i said before) - if it makes things more complicated to spell definitely with an 'a', why on earth do people do it? ive heard ignorance, laziness (sorry but this is the lamest thing ever trotted out in these circumstances) cited. to my mind its pronunciation. people often have an expectation that spelling reflects pronunciation in english, maybe because they wish it would do so more often. in the case of definitely, the schwa of the second 'i' (in my speech at any rate) corresponds more to an 'a' than an 'i', and i suspect this is why it is misspelled.

b) agreed, which is why i was only talking about the OED. i get a bit protective of it...

grimly, maybe you should eread that book....

theres a difference between what the OED intends to do and what people do with it, naturally. but the way in which it develops reflects the former not the latter. its hardly particularly market driven, given that the next edition might hit the shops (or more likely computers) in 2030 or something.

I say definitely

but thats the way i say it, you could raise the tongue up there to make it more of an 'i' sound.

ken tom. vowels are weak, which is why i await the day that words like "prst" and "vlk" become common in english.

good job you guys seemingly are not used to russian, and akane, ekane, ikane, mobile stress and muscovite accents. youd have a field day.

On a practical level this seems worth working to preserve. Just because language can change over time doesn't mean there aren't things about it that are good and worth fighting to preserve. (Ease is one of those good things, but it doesn't supercede everything else -- language would be "easier" if we all said "cow" for every single word, but that would be a pretty massive sacrifice in terms of clarity!)

It will be interesting to see if things DO change now that the middle man has been cut out to some extent.

100 results found

To steal even more from DFW-on-Garner: I'm not sure you'd defend "a conception of ethics as basically a description of all the practices of people with a particular community" (or "a conception of physics as basically a description of all the beliefs of laypeople concerning physics").

and i suppose what im confused about is the idea of preservation. who will preserve, through what agency, and what enforcement? i suppose education is supposed to fulfil this role how effective is it?
if we are to preserve written forms do we not also need to preserve pronunciation, lest one deviate too far from the other (oops! it already happened)?

It is by Homer Simpson - and he's a white male, age 18 to 49, so everyone listens to hom, no matter how dumb his suggestions are...

(ok, really he says "indubitably" but let's not quibble)

"Who will preserve, through what agency, and what enforcement" -- this stuff is obviously subject to a whole lot of class and social pressures, no question. The people who write usage guides and make dictionaries have this power in their hands, as do the people who read your job-application cover letter and don't hire you because you can't spell "definitely." But it's that way with everything! And what we should hope for is dictionary-makers and usage-guide writers who make wise, open-minded, judicious, expert decisions that weigh everything -- ease, clarity, common usage -- and make good suggestions.

The analogies don't work. Ethics are principles of good behaviour, not behaviour itself. Physics describes the properties of the physical world, not what most people think those protperties are. But language is a communication system that only works when its rules and signifiers are generally agreed upon by everyone (or most people) who use the system. It's nothing beyond that, it has no essentialist existence, it's an arbitrary set of rules and signifiers that people agree to use. Therefore it really is simply a description of all linguistic practices.

Maybe I'm also thinking all that "language is use" stuff in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations

Archel, I made exactly the same point about two hours ago, but I made it really incoherently and badly so I didn't post it.
What I'm saying is that I agree with Archel.
I also agree with Nabisco on this one. Seriously, couldn't people just bloody well learn to spell the word properly? It's not like definately is any easier to remember than definitely.

Can someone tell me an English word that's been so misspelt in say, the last century, that it's now listed as an alternative spelling?

Not including US/UK spelling leakage, or phrases mutating into single words.

You don't have to go too far back to see that 'shew' was once a dominant spelling, and yet now it's 'show'. Not so long ago 's' and 'f' were written the same way. Etc, etc. Things change when people's practices change.

I think our ideas of "not too far back" must differ. I just don't see this process happening anymore, in an age of dictionary ownership. Definitions, yes, spellings, no. I'd go along with simon and his 2026 "definately" bet. But maybe an obvious example is slipping my mind.

So, grammarians:
"There are a lot of..." vs "There's a lot of..."

My gut feeling is that the latter is wrong, but grammatically, it's A, singular, not a bunch of lots, so then the latter would be right. But it seems wrong.

Ha ha. There was a thread all about the duct/duck thing once. Well, possibly not all about. Mark S became Duck S for a while because of it.

"There are a lot of". Otherwise, you end up with "A lot of us is going to the cinema tonight" and nonsense like that. English isn't Latin.

There’s a lot of really beautiful songs

This is a sentence in an interview I'm transcribing. Does the "is" refer to "songs," plural, or "lot," singular. I think "lot."
I always edit to make people grammatically correct if it doesn't fuck with the voice. Sue me. No printed interview is verbatim.

I think this is why new additions to the dictionary rarely come from changes in common usage -- they come from either slang or jargon, two fields where words are invented or changed around to serve specific new purposes. They've been thought through a bit, consciously or not.

xpost - See wait Alba is right about "a lot!" Thinking-through is important and I am knee-jerk bad at it! There are a lot of irregularities in English and I forgot one.

Also xpost - We've talked about free reign/rein before, right? Because the funny thing is that they both make metaphorical sense -- either you're a wild horse or you're the kind, either way.

I don't like this, because I'll be in a cave like Emsk, but I actually think 'should of' has got a chance here. I am also bothered by the idea that there is an obvious example of this having recently happened that won't come to mind.

I guess if one has/will come it'll be an "eggcorn" like that. Not a straight vowel swop.

Is it that the pronunciation for nuclear can now be either nuke-you-lar or nuke-lee-err because GWB can't pronounce it correctly?

that is jan hus, by the way, the great heretic and czech spelling reformer

"hus" means "goose"

Yes. I don't really say "swop".

hahahahah!

poring? pawing?

poring innit?

xxxpost to Laurel: "Misuses" is not hyphenated.

:D

Sing-a-lounge?

It IS a long chair, but isn't it also a "lounging" chair?

But more and more lately, more and more people get actual exposure to non-standard English, regional English, all this stuff you wouldn't have come across in the past -- it's not until radio, right, that you could even get exposed to spoken English from places you didn't travel! The average American surely uses English way better than he/she did a century ago, and a century before that. It's just that we see and hear more and more of the "average American" as time goes by, which is a good thing.

Haha! It's a fair cop. :) But if you think that's going to stop me ranting again next time...we haven't met.

Are you Nabisco?

But so regularizing spelling has really clear utilities, way beyond stuff with spoken usage and pronunciation and so on. It's always weird to read old letters and see what it was like back when people were basically improvising their spelling and orthography -- you get an awfully clear demonstration of how much time and energy we save by agreeing on one version. (How mutch longur duz it take yu and yer pet mous Aljernon too reed and deecoad this sentuns?) Because non-standard stuff in speech tends to be agreed upon -- you say stuff the way you do because everyone around you says it that way, too. Whereas irregular spelling tends to be pure error, from one person, so even your own family can't be expected to share your way of notating that word.

And people know bad spelling is an error. You'd have a hard time finding people who'd actually argue that "definately" is a great sensible spelling that we should all adopt -- I doubt anyone being kind to it here is going to switch over to spelling it that way. The most you'd get is something along the lines of "who cares, you know what I meant," which is right in the grand tradition of how we spell shit: as close as you can, and then if it's really important you grab the dictionary.

My one big problem with the way some people talk about descriptivism is that they assume it means all usages (in, say, grammar) are "equal." Which isn't even exactly what descriptive linguists do: they might not put right/wrong values on stuff, but they're still interested in who says what how (by region, or demographically, or whatever), and still interested in what it connotes to people (e.g. whether it's considered vulgar or not). And really one of the reasons I'm interested in this stuff is because of the way we use different levels of standard and non-standard English to different effects, on a pretty much daily basis -- for instance the way Americans use black English constructions constantly to strike certain tones.

"busses" is the plural of buss, non? as in those things on a recording studio desk?

Bugs the crap out of me. I'd be pretty amused if some rich crazy pedant out there started tracking this stuff down and suing over it.

that's like "traveling"/"travelling." i prefer the US spelling (one l) because it makes sense that the verb "travel" would take the gerund "ing" and not "ling"). but presumably that extra l is in there for pronunciation reasons -- so we don't say "trave - ling" (where "trave" rhymes with "crave").

But those things on an audio desk are spelled "bus" as well.

x-post I do know that that should have been "By whom," though.

if we wanna get REALLY pedantic (too late to stop now), we can say that "travveling" would be the spelling that most closely reflected the pronunciation. "travelling" would sound like "tra - VELL - ing" (rhymes with "smelling," "harvelling").

Not true!
bus P Pronunciation Key (bs)
n. pl. bus·es or bus·ses

In the Greek tradition, the plural of bus should be bi.

"Do humans have evolved homicide modules - evolved psychological
mechanisms specifically dedicated to killing other humans under
certain contexts?"

DAVID BUSS
Psychologist at University of Texas at Austin; author of The Evolution
Of Desire.

Oh, no, you can't talk your way out of this one. The homicide module has been activated.

So my fit of pique had long passed by the time I got home last night, and I realized that when I read over the eggcorns, I somehow imagine them in a worst-possible scenario -- not as natural mistakes during light conversation, which is surely where most of them fall, but as an attempt by a speaker to intimidate & browbeat an audience, to further the speaker's agenda. Yes, I realize this is a silly jump to make, but it took a friend to point out that I was probably remembering someone in particular I used to deal with, someone whose offenses ranged from "fustrated" to confusing "respectful" with "respectable" and a belief that the word "magnanimous" had something to do with the size of an object (was she confusing it with "magnitude"? I'll never know.). Anyway. Blergh.

it is now 'different to'

Results 1 - 10 of about 7,540,000 for "different to"
Results 1 - 10 of about 98,200,000 for "different from"

i think i've found a retirement vocation to which i can look forward.

i think theres a split here in terms of those that deal with words professionally, considering ILX is a haven of journos/editors etc etc, to whom ambiguity and confusion, non-standard use in spelling grammar etc is an irritation and an obstacle to their work, and those that simply take an interest and in my case a certain delight, in the way people change and fiddle with the language, consciously or unconsciously, through spelling mistakes, folk etymologies, derivations etc.

for instance, in a meeting today someone came up with "inminutisimal", which i presume came from infinitesimal. he paused just before it, which suggested either that he was trying to remember the word or get his tongue round, or that he wanted to say that but exaggertae the meaning even further. either way i pretty much love stuff like that.

haha otm.

most language users generally aspire to whatever the "standard" is, even if they get stuff wrong. sure, language is fluid (the phrase descriptivists always trot out, ad nauseam), but if it were THAT fluid, no one would ever understand anyone else.

So, grammarians:
"There are a lot of..." vs "There's a lot of..."

I just realized where the confusion came from (and why Alba and I answered different ways at first). We actually decide singular/plural based on the thing there's a lot of, and whether it's a group of individual items or a numberless abstract. For instance --

A lot of us ARE going to the movie tonight.
A lot of that movie IS just an ape fighting a dinosaur.

So yeah, singular/plural not based on "a lot" but on the thing it's attached to -- a lot of people ARE, a lot of the public IS.

ok this is an epidemic and is seriously starting to bug me

I'm sure it's gotten worse, or maybe I'm seeing it more due to facebook feeds etc. I really, really, really hate it, possibly more than "your" when it should be "you're". But perhaps not quite as much as "should of".

hmmm

English is in desperate need of spelling reform. Were I a billionaire dictionary/newspaper publisher, I'd push something like Spelling Reform 1.

Draw a breth for progress,
Tred abrest ahed.
Fight agenst old spelling,
Better "red" than "read".
Spred the words at brekfast,
Mesure them in bed,
Dream of welth and tresure,
Better "ded" than "dead"

You'll have us on the Esperanto, you crazy man!

Some new restaurant opened near me recently that advertises on its front window "Vegan and Vegitarian."

They paid to have someone misspell a word on their front window.

how many people think the Canada Goose is called the Canadian Goose and shouldn't we just start calling it that when we get tired of correcting them? :-(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XQFPBM9HkM

BENT COPPERS

AC-77 investigating the very top levels of bad music writing

Standardized orthography is good, helpful, and highly convenient. It reduces friction and speeds the deciphering of written communication. But it is not strictly necessary to comprehension. The Elizabethans and their predeccesors muddled along without it.

On the whole, I'm in favor of it.

i say we just replace all written language with emoji, standardized orthography is a half measure at best

I also think standardized orthography is good. I just wish English had it.

We mostly have it Finnish, there's some minor exceptions, but almost always each letter corresponds to one sound only, regardless of where it'd placed in a word. This has definitely made it easier for my wife (who's from Costa Rica) to learn how to pronounce Finnish, but I guess to balance it out, our morphology is very difficult learn, due to the system of conjugations (which are used instead of prepositions) being way different from most other European languages.