Nouns

“… with a possible extention.”

Common English Blunders, Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this in an emailed advertisement for an instructional designer.

Problem:
The noun is misspelled.

Explanation:
The complete line was “Duration: ASAP – End of Oct. with a possible extention.” — spelled E-X-T-E-N-T-I-O-N.

There is no such word.

Then again, are recruiters supposed to be able to spell?

I believe so, and I believe that a job advertisement with misspellings hurts a recruiter’s reputation.

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

  • “extension” — with the letter “s” toward the end — 206,000,000 matches
  • “extention” — with the letter “t” toward the end — 5,760,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the noun correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 35.8-to-1, which is bad.

Considering the nearly six million matches for the incorrect spelling, one would have to conclude that the misspelling is a common English blunder.

Solution:
“… with a possible extension.”

“I know the likely hood of …”

Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this two days ago in an online forum.

Problem:
The phrase “likely hood” — with the letter Y and a space in the middle — is a misspelling of a noun.

Explanation:
As with many other words that end with the letter Y, the “y” in a word such as “likely” must be changed to “i” when the suffix H-O-O-D is appended to it.

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

  • “likelihood” — with the letter I in the middle — 31,400,000 matches
  • “likely hood” — with the letter Y and a space in the middle — 130,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the correct word vs. the incorrect phrase by a ratio of 242-to-1, which is excellent.

Still, the existence of some 130,000 Web pages with the phrase “likely hood” — with the Y and a space in the middle — is a bit depressing.

Solution:
“I know the likelihood of …”

“… it’s reliant upon System Ready-ness …”

Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this in a software test-plan document.

Problem:
“Ready-ness” — with the letter Y followed by a hyphen in the middle — is a misspelled noun.

Explanation:
As with many other words that end with the letter Y, the “y” in “ready” must be changed to “i” when the suffix N-E-S-S is appended to a word such as “ready”.

Furthermore, no hyphen should appear in the word “readiness”.

Beyond these two problems, there was no need to capitalize “System” and “Ready-ness”.

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

  • “readiness” — with the letter I in the middle — 17,700,000 matches
  • “ready-ness” — with the letter Y and a hyphen in the middle — 1,130 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 15,664-to-1, which is superb.

Solution:
“… it’s reliant upon system readiness …”