Month: April 2009

More about “Nauseous” vs. “Nauseated”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Versus

I wrote a blog post in November 2007 about “Nauseous” vs. “Nauseated”.

I recently heard an actress on a TV drama say that she felt nauseous when she should have said that she felt nauseated.

She made me think again about the two words.

And I realized something: Saying “nauseous” when one should say “nauseated” instead is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

Many Americans say “nauseous” as if it had only two syllables, as in NAW-SHUHS, instead of pronouncing all three syllables, as in NAW-ZEE-UHS.

Either way, it is simpler to say the two- or three-syllable “nauseous” than it is to say the four-syllable “nauseated”.

“We need to error on the safe side.”

Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Nouns, Verbs

I overheard a conference call in which someone said this a few days ago.

Problem:
The speaker used the wrong word for the verb after “We need to” in this statement.

Explanation:
The speaker who said “We need to error on the safe side.” was discussing a company policy with others on the conference call.

The word “error” is a noun and not a verb.

What the speaker should have used is the word “err”, which looks like “error” but is a verb that means to be mistaken or incorrect.

Perhaps the speaker simply mispronounced “err” (the verb) as “error” (the noun).

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:

  • “err on the safe side” — 23,600 matches
  • “error on the safe side” — 1,260 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used “err on the safe side” versus “error on the safe side” by a ratio of 18.7-to-1, which is good by not great.

Solution:
“We need to err on the side of caution.”

“Alumni” Revisited

Common English Blunders, Nouns, Plurals

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

I will refer to her simply as “Paula” because I don’t have permission to use her surname.

Paula had read “Alumnus” vs. “Alumna” vs. “Alumni” vs. “Alumnae”.

She also had seen a link named “Miss ND Alumni” at the top of the Miss North Dakota website.

Paula told me, “I had just dashed off a note to the webmaster of the Miss North Dakota pageant where the menu item is Miss ND Alumni, and I listed the masculine and feminine singular and plural forms of Alumnus.”.

She thanked me for “defending correct English usage”.

Thank you, Paula, for defending correct English usage, too!

And, in case my statement in the earlier post was unclear, let me stress here that it is correct to use the masculine plural form when referring to a group of males and females.

In contrast, because the Miss North Dakota contest is only for women, “Miss ND Alumnae” — not “Miss ND Alumni” — is the correct name for the link on the Miss North Dakota website.