Month: May 2009

“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.

“Thank-You For Your Business!”

Adjectives, Hyphens, Imperatives

My wife and I saw this at the bottom of an invoice a few weeks ago.

Beyond noticing that the preposition “For” should not have been capitalized, we both had a gut reaction to the hyphen in “Thank-You”.

The reaction was that the hyphenated form of the imperative “Thank You” felt like something that we used to see a few decades ago.

Of course, she or I today would use the hyphenated “Thank-You” when those two words together modify a noun, as in “Thank-You Cards”.

But neither of us would hyphenate “Thank You” when using those two words as an imperative (in, say, a headline).

I saw no matches when I searched Google for the use of the hyphenated “thank-you” as an imperative, but I admit that it was not a very deep search.

What I now wonder is whether the hyphenated imperative form in my wife’s and my memories comes from seeing typesetters’ mistakes or is based on a style that has gone out of favor.

Do you recall seeing the hyphenated imperative “Thank-You” years ago?

Do you believe that this form was a mistake or that it was a commonly accepted form?

Please let me know, and I will elaborate on this topic in a future post.

Phrase or Sentence?

General, Hyphens

I saw these two headlines in a TV ad two weeks ago:

  • “Police Impounded Cars”
  • “Bank Foreclosed Homes”

The television commercial was intended to advertise cars and homes available at deep discounts.

In other words, the TV ad was promoting two items: (a) cars that had been impounded by police; (b) homes that had been foreclosed by banks.

But the lack of punctuation was troubling.

If the headlines were intended to be phrases, then hyphens should have been used to create modifiers of the words “Cars” and “Homes”:

  • “Police-Impounded Cars”
  • “Bank-Foreclosed Homes”

Unfortunately for the advertiser, the common style for punctuation of headlines is to omit periods at the ends of sentences that form headlines.

So the common expectation of viewers of the ad was that the headlines were sentences, like so:

  • “Police Impounded Cars.”
  • “Bank Foreclosed Homes.”

But the advertiser was promoting cars and homes, not making news announcements.

So the advertiser should have punctuated the headlines as phrases.