Ten Misheard Expressions To Avoid In Your Writing

Anyone can make a typo or a spelling mistake, and fixing those is pretty easy in the spellcheck era. If you want your writing totally error-free, you also need to avoid using expressions which you think you’re using correctly but which you’ve actually misheard. Here are ten examples to watch out for.

Having studied linguistics as my main subject at university many years ago, I do recognise that language usage changes over time, and that time period can be quite short. Prescriptive rules eventually give way if the majority of speakers of a language adopt a different approach (the switch from using “he” to “they” to refer to an unspecified individual is one obvious recent example).

However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t rules that continue to apply in particular contexts, or expressions that are, for all standard purposes, flat-out incorrect. For some reason there are few things that irk me more than writers using a phrase such as “different tact” and being blissfully unaware that they’ve got it quite wrong.

This is a list of some of the most common errors in that field. They’re mistakes which you won’t necessarily notice during conversations, but which should stick out like a sore thumb (not a saw thumb) in written work. Many spell-checking systems won’t pick these errors up, though Word did flag about half of them while I was writing this piece. (Confession: I’ve gathered quite a few of these examples from my Lifehacker US colleagues.)

Some of these mistakes attract their own false etymologies. People construct a pseudo-logical explanation for the version they’re using, and over time these can become quite widely believed. Leaving aside the fact that language is not always based in obvious logic anyway (see “beyond the pale” below), the existence of an apparently plausible explanation doesn’t make those expressions correct. It just makes it a little less likely that you’ll realise you’re wrong.

Read on => http://bit.ly/a5sqSL