Misspellings

“Defuse” vs. “Diffuse”

Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Verbs, Versus

I sometimes see or hear these verbs used interchangeably.

Problem:
The verbs “defuse” and “diffuse” are not synonyms.

Explanation:
The verb “defuse” — spelled D-E-F-U-S-E — was coined in the early 1940s and means to remove the fuse from, where the “de” prefix in this verb indicates negation and the “fuse” suffix refers to a cord of readily combustible material and comes from the Italian word “fuso”, which literally means spindle.

Unless you are a terrorist or sadist, you want the police to defuse a bomb.

The verb “diffuse” — spelled D-I-F-F-U-S-E — dates back to the late 1300s and means to spread or disseminate, where the “dif” prefix means apart or away and the “fuse” suffix comes from a form of the Latin word “fundere”, which literally means to melt.

Once the police have defused a bomb, they often will diffuse a message to the public about their success.

I believe that the oral/auditory confusion comes from mispronunciations of these two verbs.

I believe that the written confusion comes from ignorance about the roots of these two verbs and from misspellings originating from that ignorance or the mispronunciations.

Solution:
Remember that the “de” in “defuse” indicates negation, and remember that the “dif” in “diffuse” means apart or away.

“Signitures”

Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this last week on an order form.

Problem:
This word is misspelled.

Explanation:
The order form had an area at the bottom where the customer was supposed to sign his or her name.

The order-form creator misspelled “Signatures” as “Signitures” — with an “i” in the middle — perhaps because of confusion from words such as “signify” — spelled S-I-G-N-I-F-Y — or perhaps because of mispronunciation of the letter “a” in the word “signatures”.

“Signify” dates back to the early 1200s and comes from the Latin word “significare”, which means to make a sign.

In contrast, “signature” dates back to around 1530 and comes from the Latin word “signare”, which means to mark.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “signature” — with the letter “a” in the middle — 185,000,000 matches
  • “signatures” — with the letter “a” in the middle — 34,700,000 matches
  • “signiture” — with the letter “i” in the middle — 384,000 matches
  • “signitures” — with the letter “i” in the middle — 57,700 matches

Combining the singular and plural results, this tells me that Web authors have used the correct letter “a” over the incorrect letter “i” by a ratio of 497-to-1, which is excellent. However, over 400 thousand misspellings is a bit troubling.

Solution:
“Signatures”

“Perogative” Revisited

Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns

I got an interesting email message last Sunday from one of your fellow readers of this blog.

I will refer to him simply as “Ian” because I don’t have permission to use his surname.

Ian had read “Perogative” and wanted to share his own perspective from the United Kingdom.

When I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) for my original blog post, I got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “perogative” — spelled P-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 5,750,000 matches
  • “prerogative” — spelled P-R-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 5,610,000 matches

This told me that Web authors had favored the incorrect word over the correct word by a ratio of 1.02-to-1, which is horrible!

When Ian tries to access Google.com in the UK, Google auto-redirects him to Google.co.uk, where he got these statistics:

  • “perogative” — spelled P-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 244,000 matches
  • “prerogative” — spelled P-R-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 4,000,000 matches

I could not exactly reproduce Ian’s results, but I searched at Google.co.uk and got nearly the same ratio that he did.

The 16.4-to-1 dominance of the correct spelling at Google.co.uk puzzles Ian and his fiancée, given that they agree that the incorrect pronunciation and spelling of “prerogative” is very common in the UK.