Words like Alzheimer's, Old-timers, and Dog-eat-dog

Have you ever been annoyed by words that are consistently misused or mispronounced? Certainly there are words you can use interchangeably but there are several word that are incorrectly used and do not reflect the meaning intended.

English was my favorite subject in school, but I can be as guilty as the next person when it comes to the occasional screw up by using the wrong word.

One of my pet peeves is the misuse of the word Alzheimer. Alzheimer's disease is a mental disorder named after the German neurologist describing the loss of cognitive ability. This word is often incorrectly referred to as "Old-timers disease". Old-timers is a reference to elderly persons or possibly a person of considerable tenure in a given place or activity. Although old-timers get Alzheimer's, it is incorrect to refer to the disease as Old-timers disease. Not all old-timers get Alzheimer's disease.

Have you ever heard the word "athlete"pronounced Ath-a-lete? The two syllable word incorrectly becomes a 3 syllable word. Sometimes three syllable words like "business" gets reduced to a two syllable (non)word, bidness.

Have you every received a hearty congradulation from a friend when they meant to give you a congratulation? But this should not be confused with graduation as opposed to gratuation. While we're on the subject of oppositions, have you ever confused opposed with apposed which describes where in proximity?

Frequently you hear folks refer to coffee in wrong terms. People use "expresso" when they mean espresso. Or perculate when they mean percolate. Perculate is not an actual word. If in doubt, stick with java. The letter "s" gets replaced with the letter "x" in the word excape, when it should be escape. Another word that people replace the "s" with "x" is expecially when it should be especially.

I personally automatically type excercise for the word exercise. Everytime I do, I have to go back and delete the extra letter "c" that I have added.

Another common mistake is using excetra when you actually mean two separate words, et cetra or etcetra. The abbreviated form of etcetera is etc.

What about the word separate? How many times do you spell separate by changing the "a" to "e" spelling it seperate?

In the sentence, "Herb likes to grow herbs in his garden,", the "H" is properly pronounced in the man's name and can be pronounced or left silent when talking about an aromatic plant.

A word I have to slow down and think about for correct spelling is jewelry. I have a tendency to spell it jewlery in error.

One of my earlier jobs was in a library. Many folks will use the word library, thus they pronounce it LIBE-air-ee instead of LIBE-rare-ee. Removing "r's" from words can happen frequently. People say Febuary when they mean February. As I am typing this, I am thinking.......I am one of those people who will leave the "r" out of February when saying it.

How about the word "often". The "t" is silent and should not be pronounced.

Would you ever mix up the words perspire and say prespire instead? Or how about the words prostrate and prostate. For me, these are words I have to stop and think about before I use them and I am sure I have used them incorrectly. The funny thing I think of in this situation is, if I "did" use it incorrectly, the person I was talking to probably didn't notice.

The phrase dog-eat-dog world had me stumped for years. I grew up thinking it was doggy-dog world which makes no sense at all. I said it the way I thought I heard it, but was wrong.

I have a brother-in-law who participates in triathlons. Many people will pronounce it Triath-a-lons adding an extra "a".

Yoke is not yolk and have very different meanings. The same applies to wet and whet. Although they sound the same, they are spelled differently and do not mean anything alike. Wet means to soak whereas whet means to sharpen.

We can go on and on with mispronounced or misused words. Blame it on culture or regional differences but what ever your excuse, many times the word is wrong. Truly the English language is interesting. It is a hard language to learn because of all the different ways of pronouncing the same word or words that sound alike but are spelled differently. I wrote this article to shed some light on common errors that we all make. Hopefully once we know a word correctly, we will begin to say it the way it is intended to be pronounced.