1576: daemon vs. demon Apr 8, 2019
'Daemon' today may just look like an older way of writing 'demon', and while there is some truth to that, it is much deeper. As with many English words with 'ae' or 'oe' representing only one sound, this word is from Greek. At that time, it could mean anything supernatural from 'deity' to 'lesser spirit', and this reflected somewhat in 'daemon', which still means 'divinity' or 'inner spirit'. The purely negative connotations came later, and are now denoted exclusively in 'demon', despite identical pronunciation. Indeed, 'demon' only became the popular way to write the word in the 19th century.
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1544: Vittle vs Victual Mar 6, 2019
English spelling often is not clearly related to the pronunciation, and while this is an acknowledged nuisance, there have been times when this is done, if not intentionally, then incidentally counterproductively. In the past for instance, the word 'victual' was written as 'vittle', and given that 'vittle' does rhyme with 'little' and 'tittle', this pattern makes a lot of sense. However, 'victual' with the addition of the notable C especially mirrors the original Latin 'victualis'. In Latin however, the sounds represented by the spelling would have been more or less pronounced.
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1512: 'Expat' vs 'Immigrant' Feb 1, 2019
The terms 'expat' and 'immigrant' hold a huge amount of extralinguistic connotations, but looking at how academics use those terms could help to diffuse some of those problems perhaps. There is a popular belief that "expat is only for white (or generally privileged) people", but this isn't quite true. In technical senses, an expat is any person who lives in another country for economic reasons but holds citizenship to another with no intention of giving it up; usually this will be someone moved by his or her company. An immigrant refers to anyone who has moved to another country, usually in search of another job and or citizenship to that foreign country. Often these terms can overlap, and especially get confused due to migration agreements in places like the European Union, but, in an academic sense, these are not simply based off of class; in popular usage this might have extra connotations however.
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1495: Diphthongs Vs. Spelling Jan 15, 2016
When two vowels combine together in one syllable, it's a diphthong, but orthography doesn't always represent this. For instance, while writing one vowel to correspond with one sound should be easy enough, in words like the English 'I', what is actually two sounds [ai] is represented with one (note that 'eye' accomplishes this). In German, where spelling tends to be more standard, that same sound is represented by writing <ei>, and so that is maintained, but the sound [i]—as in 'key'—in German is usually written with two letters [ie], even though this is not a diphthong. Ultimately, in any language with a written history, tradition will supersede reason at times.
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1492: Birth Rate vs Fertility Rate Jan 12, 2019
Often used in statistical modeling, 'birth rate' and 'fertility rate' are both useful terms to describe demographics, but are not quite synonymous. A fertility rate is calculated to be the average number of children born to women ages 15-44 in their lifetimes. 'Birthrate' is often misused to describe this statistic, but it refers more specifically to the number of live births per 1,000 people in the population every year. Clearly these are used in similar situations, but the numbers look quite different.
1462: Islamic State vs Islamic Republic Dec 12, 2018
Even though the two may be used somewhat interchangeably in lay conversations, there is an understood difference between an 'Islamic state' and an 'Islamic republic'. The former refers to a country that has Sharia as its constitution in some respect, and includes country like Saudi Arabia. In this way, on a state-level the country is Islamic, and usually this will exclude democratic elections. Meanwhile, an Islamic republic may also involve Islam on a legislative level, but it will also include more elections. Ultimately however, there is a great deal of overlaps, and these are just norms for usage.
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1429: Jewry vs. Israel Nov 9, 2018
Over the last century, the term 'Israel' has gained a new meaning, as it refers to the modern nationstate. Before this, it usually denoted 'the Jewish people' or would refer to the ancient kingdom. However, to clear up this newfound confusion, the term 'Jewry', which has existed for hundreds of years, can be and often is used. Indeed, after the land was set aside in the 1920's, the usage of the term 'Jewry' soared, and it clears up the confusion that the term 'Israel' can cause. This can be seen in the graph below.
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1387: Ground vs Grinded Sep 28, 2018
In a dictionary, it will list the forms of 'grind' including the participle 'ground' and "(rare) grinded". Some spell-checking programs will even count 'grinded' as a misspelling, but this is becoming less accurate. 'Ground is still used dominantly for most grammatical objects, but in newer usages of the word the preferred participle is 'grinded'. This tends to crop up when the subject matter is about dancing, sex, or relating to marijuana, for which any form of 'grind' is fairly new. This could be because people don't care about traditional grammar, or because they are consciously trying to distinguish the two.
1368: Living vs. Merely Revived Sep 9, 2018
One thing that separates Modern Hebrew from Cornish is that it changed. Like any second language learner will know, sometimes the textbook-version of a language will be technically correct but sound odd to native language speakers. This is because languages are constantly evolving, and the writers of language learning tools can both only work so fast, and want to try to follow patterns more closely than otherwise. When efforts to revive a language take place, one thing everyone involved must keep in mind is that the original form of the language should not be identical to what's being taught. This, in large part, is why even when languages like Cornish or Latin are taught to people—including children—they are still considered dead, but Hebrew is living; only a living language can evolve.
1308: Stomp vs. Stamp Jul 10, 2018
With the exception reference to postage-stamps, the verbs 'stamp' and 'stomp' are more or less interchangeable; this is even true of phrases such as "stamp/stomp out" or "stamping/stomping grounds", which is much rarer of synonyms. The reason for this is that 'stomp'—even though it is more widely used—only came to be as variation of 'stamp' in the 19th century, and so all of those phrases with such interchangeability have used both. It is likely that soon 'stomp' will be included in more of its own senses, both as an ordinary verb and as part of a phrase, but 'stamp' is still widely used today, particularly outside of the US. Which would you use in those phrases?
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1284: Parapraxis: Psychologists vs. Linguists Jun 16, 2018
Parapraxis is another term for a Freudian slip, i.e. making a linguistic error which is subconsciously motivated (humorously: "when you say one thing and mean your mother"). There is a large debate going on between linguists and psychologists on this subject; in a classical psychoanalytic reading (though there are plenty of new theories) the erroneous replacement word is drawn in this assumedly systematic way from words which are related—in general—semantically, with much more emphasis placed upon the meaning of the slip that other factors such as how it sounds. A more strictly linguistic approach to this problem—forgetting for a moment the different takes within the neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic fields—would consider more factors, such as how a word sounds, and more to the point, how it is stressed. Think about how you may have experienced a word on the tip of your tongue (ToT), believing it started with one sound, and actually it began with a different sound, but the sound you remembered featured somewhere in the word where the stress may have been placed (if you haven't done this in the past, don't worry, but maybe considering playing with this in the future).
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1258: Creoles vs Languages May 20, 2018
What separates creoles and pidgins from whole languages with heavy influence from other languages?
Some languages are very pure in their grammar and vocabulary, such as Icelandic which stays incredibly true to its Germanic roots, and other languages take elements from all over, such as Haitian Creole, which uses French as the lexifier language (i.e. where it gets its vocabulary) but with a lot of influence from West African languages. However, what separates a language like Haitian Creole from a non-creole language like Yiddish, is that while Yiddish has a lot of influence from Hebrew and Slavic languages in its vocabulary, phonology, and morphonology (which includes affixes and things like that) but its core vocabulary is Germanic, and so is the grammar. This definition has historically raised a lot of questions about English.
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1239: Tense vs. Aspect: 'Do' and 'Have' May 1, 2018
The auxiliary verbs 'have' and 'do' (which is extremely rare outside of a few languages, having been borrowed from Cornish) have similar functions on the surface, but are extremely different. The difference between "I did [verb]" and "I had [verb]" is that while both 'do' and 'have' are often used to indicate past action instead of (or in addition to) conjugating the main verb, they show different grammatical aspects. Simply put, 'do' is for when the action is continuous or perhaps habitual "I did run" which is the imperfect aspect whereas 'have' only refers to that which has (had) an end, "I had run", which is the perfect aspect. This all becomes trickier considering the present tense "I have run" is the present tense but takes place in the past, and "I do run" is clunky; most people opt for simply 'I run' and only use 'do' for the negative form, or for emphasis.
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