Mispronunciations

“… content assessable from the home page”

Adjectives, Devolution toward Simpler, Mispronunciations

I saw this in a PowerPoint document.

Problem:
The word “assessable” makes no sense in this phrase.

Explanation:
The PowerPoint document was about online support content. The slide in which this appeared was about providing a link to support content from the home page of the website.

The adjective “assessable” means capable of being assessed (e.g., for the purpose of taxation).

The PowerPoint author probably mispronounces — or at least hears mispronounced — “accessible” as “assessable” instead.

If you cannot imagine this, then think of the way that Jo Frost on the ABC TV show “Supernanny” mispronounces “That’s not acceptable.” as “That’s not asseptable.” instead.

I believe that this kind of mispronunciation — mispronouncing a “k” sound followed by an “s” sound as simply an “s” sound — is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

Solution:
“… content accessible from the home page”

“Determinate” vs. “Determinant”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Nouns, Verbs, Versus

I sometimes hear these two words used interchangeably.

Problem:
These two words are not synonyms.

Explanation:
The primary definition of the word “determinate” as a verb is to make certain of. The primary definition of the word “determinate” as an adjective is having defined limits.

The primary definition of the word “determinant” as a noun is a determining agent. The primary definition of the word “determinant” as an adjective is having the power of deciding.

I believe that these words most often are used interchangeably because of sloppy pronunciation.

Solution:
When using each of these words as an adjective, think having defined limits for “determinate” and having the power of deciding for ” determinant”.

“Accessable”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Misspellings

I saw this in a PowerPoint document.

Problem:
This adjective is misspelled.

Explanation:
I believe that the misspelling of the adjective “accessible” is mostly due to the common mispronunciation — as “accessable” — of that adjective.

Other adjectives that use “ible” instead of “able” include “visible” and “horrible”.

The suffix “ible” is a variation of the suffix “able”; most people use memorization to know which suffix to use.

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

  • “accessible” — 130,000,000 matches
  • “accessable” — 2,170,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 59.9:1, which is good, but the fact that the Web contains more than two million instances of “accessable” is disappointing.

Solution:
“Accessible”