Nouns

“We have to error on the side of caution.”

Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Nouns, Verbs

I heard U.S. Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) say this yesterday on Fox News Channel.

Problem:
The Congressman used the wrong word for the verb in this popular expression.

Explanation:
The word “error” is a noun and not a verb.

What the Congressman should have used is the word “err”, which looks like “error” but is a verb that means to be mistaken or incorrect.

Perhaps the Congressman simply mispronounced “err” (the verb) as “error” (the noun).

Wondering whether this could be more than a pronunciation problem, I searched Google — with the quotation marks included in the search box — for “error on the side of caution” and “err on the side of caution” and got about 20,200 and 441,000 matches, respectively. That tells me that Web authors have written the expression correctly by a ratio of 21.8:1, which is very good.

Still, over 20,000 matches for “error on the side of caution” indicates a substantial number of confused writers!

Solution:
“We have to err on the side of caution.”

“Heighth”

Mispronunciations, Nouns

I heard a landscape designer say this yesterday on an HGTV television program.

Problem:
This is a mispronunciation of a noun for one of the three basic dimensions.

Explanation:
The endings of the nouns for the other two basic dimensions seem to interfere with how some speakers pronounce “height”.

The nouns “length” and “width” end with the “th” sound that begins the word “thin”, so it seems that some speakers want to pronounce “height” with this “th” sound, too.

Wondering whether this speech problem also occurred in writing on the Web, I searched Google for “heighth” and “height” and got about 112,000 and 42,500,000 matches, respectively. That tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly by a ratio of 379.5:1, which is excellent. And, because the most popular “heighth” matches on Google talk about why this is a misspelling of “height”, the ratio of correct use to incorrect use probably is much higher.

Solution:
“Height”

“Supremist”

Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Mispronunciations, Nouns

I heard the president of Morehouse College say this on C-SPAN yesterday at Tavis Smiley’s “State of the Black Union 2008” conference in New Orleans.

Problem:
This is a mispronunciation of the correct word.

Explanation:
Although it’s true that one dictionary — Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English — contains this word, one has to realize that dictionaries not only are sources of what’s correct but also are references to incorrect forms.

For fun, I searched Google for “supremist” and “supremacist” (the correct word) and got about 84,700 and 1,280,000 matches, respectively. That tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly by a ratio of 15.1:1, which is good, but not excellent.

I believe that the use of “supremist” instead of “supremacist” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis. The incorrect word has three syllables to the correct word’s four syllables, and it is simpler to pronounce the “ist” sound than to pronounce the “acist” sound.

Solution:
“Supremacist”