Month: August 2008

“Pronounciation”

Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns, Verbs

I frequently hear this and occasionally see this.

Problem:
“Pronounciation” is a misspelling and mispronunciation that makes the writer or speaker sound dumb.

Explanation:
“Pronounciation” is an ignorant conversion of the verb “pronounce” into a noun.

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:

  • “pronunciation” — 20,700,000 matches
  • “pronounciation” — 1,130,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the correct word vs. the incorrect word by a ratio of 18.3-to-1, which is not good, especially given more than a million matches for the incorrect word.

Solution:
“Pronunciation”

“I thought that the ask of me was …”

Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns, Verbs

I heard this in a conference call yesterday.

Problem:
The word “ask” is not a noun, except when capitalized, in which case it means something different.

Explanation:
Except for the capitalized form “Ask” — spelled CAPITAL-A-S-K — which refers in Scandinavian mythology to the first man, who was made from an ash tree by the Scandinavian gods, the word “ask” is a verb, not a noun.

The person who said “I thought that the ask of me was …” was referring to a request that someone had made to him. This gives us the solution.

Unfortunately, I increasingly hear Americans misuse “ask” as a substitute for the noun “request”. I believe that this is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to say the one-syllable “ask” than to say the two-syllable “request”.

Solution:
“I thought that the request to me was …”

“Please forward that on to him.”

Prepositions, Redundancies

I heard this yesterday in a conference call.

Problem:
The word “on” does not belong in the sentence.

Explanation:
Someone was asking the conference-call facilitator to forward an email message to someone who was not attending the call. He said, “Please forward that on to him.”

One of the definitions of the preposition “on” is in the direction of, as in “to travel on a northerly course”.

This definition also is the primary definition of the preposition “to”.

Therefore, the preposition “on” did not belong in the conference-call attendee’s sentence.

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

  • “forward that to” — 71,600 matches
  • “forward that on to” — 26,100 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the expression correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 2.74-to-1, which is dreadful.

Solution:
“Please forward that to him.”