Month: October 2008

“Any Occassion Top”

Common English Blunders, Hyphens, Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this last evening on television.

Problems:
1. A word is misspelled.
2. A hyphen is missing.

Explanation:
Fashion designer Tim Gunn has a program on the Bravo television channel called “Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style”.

I saw in the episode last evening on this program a list of what he calls his “10 Essential Elements”; one of the elements was listed as “Any Occassion Top” — with no hyphen and with a second “s” in the second word.

Spelling the noun “Occasion” with a second “s” is a common English blunder.

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

  • “occasion” — spelled correctly as O-C-C-A-S-I-O-N — 218,000,000 matches
  • “occassion” — spelled incorrectly as O-C-C-A-S-S-I-O-N — 3,340,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have favored the correct spelling over the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 65.3-to-1, which is very good but not excellent, given the more than three million incorrect spellings.

Correctly spelling the noun “Occasion” fixes only the first problem. When an adjective plus a noun modify another noun, the adjective and first noun must be joined with a hyphen to form the modifier of the second noun.

So the adjective “Any” plus the first noun “Occasion” must be joined with a hyphen to form the modifier of the second noun “Top”.

Solution:
“Any-Occasion Top”

“Does that have any relevancy … ?”

Nouns

I heard this last evening on The Bill O’Reilly Show on Fox News Channel.

Question:
What is the difference between “relevancy” and “relevance”?

Explanation:
The host of the show asked a guest, “Does that have any relevancy [to the topic being discussed]?”

The word “relevancy” struck me as odd, given that I grew up using the word “relevance”, so I researched these two words.

According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary:

  • “relevancy” is a noun that dates back to 1561 and today primarily means relevance;
  • “relevance” is a noun that dates back to 1733 and today primarily means relation to the matter at hand.

This gives us the answer to the question.

Answer:
There is no difference in primary meaning between between the older noun “relevancy” and the younger noun “relevance”.

Freckle

Nouns

As soon as I said this noun this morning, I wondered about its origin.

The goal of this blog post is to promote curiosity about words.

“Freckle” is one of those words that made me curious, so I had to research its origin in a dictionary.

“Freckle” is a word that does not sound like most other English words — at least, not to me.

Sure enough, when I researched its origin, I confirmed that “freckle” does not come from French or German or one of the other dominant influences on English.

Instead, it seems to come from the Old Norse word “frekna”, a word that persists today in Norwegian and Icelandic, and a word that became “fräkna” in Swedish.

What words in English have made you wonder about their origins? Let me know!