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Before we get to sulferous - one for the apostrophe police

To: Birding Aus <>
Subject: Before we get to sulferous - one for the apostrophe police
From: knightl <>
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 17:10:44 +1000
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1256469,00.html

Where to stick grocer's apostrophe

John Ezard, arts correspondent
Thursday  July      8, 2004
The Guardian

We have finally got the hang of the grocer's apostrophe. But we still have little clue how to defuse, or diffuse, our other hang-ups about the correct use of words - and computer spellcheckers only make our task harder.

This is today's (not todays) verdict from Oxford University Press. It reports evidence from its 300m-word database of "a new kind of problem" among otherwise relatively literate people.

One of the epidemic errors of the past 30 years - unnecessary, misplaced or omitted apostrophes in the words "its"and "it's" - has dwindled to only about 8% of people, possibly because the mistake has drawn so much ridicule. It was dubbed "the grocer's apostrophe" because of its unnecessary use in plural words on shop signs or placards (Price's Slashed).

But it has been replaced by misuse of "diffuse" or "defuse" (as in "A coach can diffuse the situation by praising the players").

Research for the new Concise Oxford English Dictionary, published today, found that this word crime was committed in some 50% of examples on the database. It is now rated as the commonest in the language.

Second commonest is uncertainty over when to use "rein" or "reign", found in 26% of examples, as in "A taxi driver had free reign to charge whatever he likes".

Third most frequent (21%) is "tow" instead of "toe", as in "Some pointed to his refusal to tow the line under Tony Blair". Fourth (12%) is "pouring" instead of "poring", as in "He spent his evenings pouring over western art magazines".

Other common confusions include pedal and peddle, draw and drawer, compliment and complement and their, there and they're.

Angus Stevenson, of OUP dictionaries, said yesterday: "This seems to be something of a new situation. These errors are occurring in texts that are otherwise quite well spelt, possibly because of the increasing use of spellcheckers. Spellcheckers can tell you whether a word is correctly spelt - but not whether it is properly used.

"Also, we find that people are picking up words and phrases from the media and bolting them together into fully formed sentences."

The OUP database contains mainly written word usages. To measure speech, it used to include recordings from radio but now takes examples from the internet instead.

"People are increasingly writing on the internet as if it was a spoken rather than a written medium, with all the mistakes which arise through doing that," Mr Stevenson said.

Newly coined, or revived, words and phrases printed for the first time in the latest Concise dictionary include metrosexual (used about David Beckham and others), sex up, congestion charge, health tourism, pole dancing, speed dating and threequel (a second sequel).

 Often confused words

diffuse/defuse
reign/rein
tow/toe
pour/pore
draw/drawer
compliment/complement
discreet/discrete
affect/effect
flare/flair
grisly/grizzly
it's/its
loath/loathe
loose/lose
peddle/pedal
principal/principle
stationery/stationary
whose/who's
their/there/they're



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