Nouns

“member priviledges”

Common English Blunders, Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this yesterday on a website.

Problem:
One of the words is misspelled.

Explanation:
I had just registered my name and address at a website where I wanted to make a purchase.

The website permits purchases by returning members, by new members, and by those who choose not to create a member account.

I chose to create a member account so that I could track my order.

An account-creation confirmation page appeared, apparently to allay my concerns about creating yet another identity (“member account”) at yet another website.

The Web page referred to “member priviledges”, with the second word spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-D-G-E-S.

The misspelling was obvious to me, if not to the page’s author. The second word should have been spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E-S (with no “d” in the middle).

This misspelling is a common English blunder, but I wondered just how common it was.

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:

  • “privilege” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E — 31,400,000 matches
  • “privileged” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E-D — 16,900,000 matches
  • “privileges” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E-S — 21,100,000 matches
  • “priviledge” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-D-G-E — 694,000 matches
  • “priviledged” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-D-G-E-D — 354,000 matches
  • “priviledges” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-D-G-E-S — 362,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spellings versus the incorrect spellings by a ratio of 49.2-to-1, which is good but not excellent, especially in light of the more than 1.4 million total misspellings.

I suspect that these misspellings come from mental interference by the word “ledge” — spelled L-E-D-G-E.

Solution:
“member privileges”

“Accuracy” vs. “Precision”

Nouns, Versus

I frequently hear people confuse accuracy and precision.

Problem:
These two nouns are not synonyms, at least not in science.

Explanation:
The scientific definition of the noun “accuracy” is the degree to which a measurement agrees with that measurement’s standard value.

The scientific definition of the noun “precision” is the degree to which a set of measurements of the same sample agree with that set’s mean.

Imagine an archery target, and imagine an archer shooting arrows at that target.

The closer that an arrow lands to the center of the target (the bull’s eye), the more accurate is the shot.

In contrast, if an archer can shoot several arrows that all land in almost the same location, then one can say that the archer is precise.

An archer can be accurate simply by the fact that bull’s eye is the mean of the points at which all of his or her arrows land.

An archer can be precise simply by the fact that all of his or her arrows land in the same location.

Precision speaks to reproducibility and standard deviation within the sample. Higher precision in a trial (e.g., in shooting a set of arrows) refers to greater reproducibility and smaller standard deviation.

Accuracy speaks to nearness to the target. Higher accuracy in a trial (e.g., in shooting a set of arrows) refers to less distance between the target location or value and the mean of the actual locations or values.

This discussion has these implications:

  • A trial can be accurate but not precise.
  • A trial can be precise but not accurate.
  • An ideal trial is both accurate and precise.
  • One can make a calculated adjustment for a trial that is precise but not accurate (that is, a trial that is biased), if one knows the degree of inaccuracy (the degree of bias).
  • One can ignore a trial’s imprecision (the degree of variability) in a trial that is accurate but not precise, if one’s primary interest is that the mean within the trial is very close to the goal or target.

Solution:
Think “nearness to a goal” when thinking of accuracy. Think “reproducibility” when thinking of precision.

“Phonics” vs. “Phonetics”

Nouns, Versus

I wondered the other day about these two words.

Problem:
One of these nouns formerly was a synonym for the other noun but now is not.

Explanation:
The noun “phonics”, which dates back to around the year 1680, refers to a way to teach spelling and reading based on the phonetic interpretation of ordinary spelling.

Put briefly, the primary meaning of the noun “phonetics”, which dates back to around the year 1840, is the study of speech sounds.

An obsolete meaning of the noun “phonics” is the noun “phonetics”.

Given that “phonics” is an older noun than “phonetics”, it seems that it was temporarily fashionable to use “phonics” as a synonym for “phonetics”, a much newer noun.

Note that one does not “teach phonics” unless one is teaching others how to use phonics for teaching spelling and reading.

For example, children in elementary school would not be “taught phonics”.

Instead, their teacher would “use phonics” to teach those children to read and spell, and that teacher would have been “taught phonics” by his or her college professor.

Solution:
Think “a way to teach” when thinking of the noun “phonics”; think “sounds” when thinking of the noun “phonetics”.