Nouns

“Entrance” vs. “Entry”

Nouns, Versus

I saw the word “ENTRY” yesterday over a door that I would have labeled an “ENTRANCE”.

My personal preference is to use “entrance” to refer to a location and to use “entry” to refer to the act of entering, which explains why “ENTRY” on an over-door sign caught my eye.

This prompted me to learn more about each of these nouns.

The noun “entrance” dates back to the mid-1400s (MF).

The noun “entry” dates back to the late-1200s (L).

Dictionaries’ definitions of “entrance” and “entry” are so similar that I would call them synonyms.

Do you make any distinction between “entrance” and “entry”, or do you use them fully interchangeably?

Please contact me, and tell me where you grew up (your hometown) and how you use each of these nouns.

Once I have enough responses, I will share the results — without your name or email address, but with your hometown.

Thanks!

“Hypothesis” vs. “Theory”

Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns, Versus

I often hear people use one word when they mean the other.

Problem:
These two nouns are not synonyms.

Explanation:
I often hear people say something like “I have a theory about …”, such as “about why Janey stays out late” or “about why Jim does not like his boss” or “about why women generally have more close friends than do men”.

The primary definition of the noun “theory” is a substantiated group of statements that explain a set of phenomena.

In contrast, the primary meaning of the noun “hypothesis” is a proposed, tentative explanation for an observation or phenomenon.

As noted at Wikipedia, “A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.”

So one starts with observations, then formulates hypotheses to explain those observations, and then tests those hypotheses. Once those hypotheses have been validated, one can create a theory.

I believe that the common English blunder of using the word “theory” where the word “hypothesis” is required is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. (Note that I call this a hypothesis, not a theory!)

It is simpler to say or write the two-syllable, six-letter “theory” than it is to say or write the four-syllable, ten-letter “hypothesis”.

Solution:
Use “hypothesis” for a proposition to explain an observation. Use “theory” to refer to an analysis of a collection of facts and their relation to each other.

“The goal of these interventionalists …”

Nouns

I heard this earlier today on CNN.

Problem:
The word “interventionalists” is non-standard English.

Explanation:
Someone on the CNN television channel this morning was interviewing physician-turned-TV-commentator Sanjay Gupta about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the impact of yesterday’s U.S. Airways plane crash in the Hudson River on the plane’s passengers and crew.

Gupta was talking about the importance of psychological intervention to prevent PTSD among the passengers and crew.

Gupta started his sentence with “The goal of these interventionalists …”.

I had never heard the word “interventionalist”, so I tried to find it in a dictionary but failed.

Apparently Gupta thought that he could add the suffix “ist” to the perfectly appropriate adjective “interventional” to form a noun for someone who practices intervention.

Instead, he should have added the suffix “ist” to the noun “intervention” to form the noun for someone who practices intervention.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “interventionist” — 1,770,000 matches
  • “interventionalist” — 52,600 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “interventionist” versus the incorrect “interventionalist” by a ratio of 33.7-to-1, which is very good.

Solution:
“The goal of these interventionists …”