Advice on Mondegreens from the Grammar Curmudgeon
Feb 15 '05 (Updated Sep 20 '05)
The Bottom Line Dew knot depend on yore ear wen righting unfamiliar words and phrases. Lady Mondegreen is alive and kicking!
Lady Mondegreen is alive and well, and she's living at Epinions. Long assumed to dwell exclusively in the music department, where she's been accused of mishearing such lyrics as "There's a bathroom on the right" and "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy,"* it's come to the Grammar Curmudgeon's attention that the lovely, albeit somewhat scatterbrained, lady in fact wanders aimlessly about the entire community spreading her influence everywhere. Nice work, if you can get it, eh? Here are a few of the prose posies that the lady has strewn about the site...
...[the author] did a suburb job, making me wish I had someone in my life like the protagonist.... Unless I miss my guess, Lady M intended to say a superb job. But then who can really know? Perhaps the writer works out of a split-level tract home that's a mirror image of the house next door...
...it's reasonably priced, with a staff that's at your beckon call... Good one, Lady! You converted a verb into a noun, which, given the number of nouns that have been verbed in recent years, seems only fair. In actuality, that half-familiar idiom is beck and call. The word "beck" is a little-used noun for the act of beckoning, and is rarely spotted separate from "call," with which it is now apparently a linguistic Siamese twin.
...that I can only assume to be a person getting their "just desserts." To which tGC says, "mmmmm-mmmm! The Lady's serving dessert!" But seriously, although just deserts may be pronounced like the name of a restaurant that serves only sweets, it actually means "an outcome (good or bad) that is well deserved." Some may try to tell you that "deserts" are always big dry places with lots of sand, but they're 1) limited in their concept of a desert and 2) wrong. Of course, Lady M is also wont to level the linguistic playing fields with such goodies as ...make sure you save room for desert... Yeah, sure - which one: Gobi? Sahara? Sonoran?
...such a concept is an athema to everything that I stand for... Excuse me? It's a what?! Oh - I get it, you meant anathema, one word instead of two. Now I gotcha. For those who aren't familiar, "anathema" has a long and storied history in religion, where it means an ecclesiastical ban such as excommunication. In the secular world, it simply means that which is detestable. As an aside, "anathema" does not generally require an article. One does not say "It is an anathema to the church," one says "it is anathema to the church." But then you knew that, didn't you (just as you don't use "of" with "myriad," either).
...it made her jump when her little potty began to play a Royal Fan fair... You might be surprised (or perhaps not) at how often Lady M plops that little silliness on the page. The word's really fanfare, meaning a flourish of brass instruments or (by extension) any excessive pageantry.
And now for a little advice. A few rants back tGC held forth on the different sounds - and meanings - of similar words that end in "th" and "the" - including "breath/breathe," "loath/loathe," and "cloth/clothe." Now it's time for... the difference between "ice" and "ise."
The italicized sentences are wrong:
• My advise? run away from this machine as fast as you can...
• I advice you not to carry all of your ski gear while you wait for boot fittings
The word advise is a verb, meaning to give counsel or recommendations, also known as advice. The S in the word gives the second syllable a "Z" sound so that it rhymes with "eyes." Correct usage would be, "I advise you to proofread your work before publishing it."
On the other hand, advice is a noun (according to Schoolhouse Rock, a "noun is a person place or thing") meaning recommendations, information, or counseling. The word rhymes with "ice." Correct usage would be, "My advice is to find yourself a good dictionary and read it cover to cover."
• All the parts are now on my hardtail and vise-versa.
Strictly speaking, vice versa does not contain a hyphen. The Latin term for "with the order reversed" also contains only one S.
• The devise is small and fits into your hand
• ...the hero could not device a plan...
Just as with advise/advise, the key to both pronunciation and usage is the penultimate letter: devise is, like advise, a verb (meaning to formulate or assemble from new ideas). The word rhymes with "eyes." In contrast, device is a noun, meaning "a contrivance or an invention serving a particular purpose, especially a machine." Device rhymes with "ice." Your obligatory usage note: one might "devise a plan to overthrow the government, using many ingenious devices."
And while it's on tGC's mind, here's a little tidbit you might want to file wherever you keep your vocabulary notes...
ingenious means inventive or imaginative
ingenuous means naïve
igneous is a rock type.
Don't confuse 'em, OK? Especially the first two, since they are very nearly antonyms.
TTFN!
the Grammar Curmudgeon
This is the eleventh note from the Grammar Curmudgeon, an irregular series of... what, "diatribes"? "rants"? "suggestions"? on improving the quality of your writing - not just here on Epinions, but every time you create a sentence, a paragraph, or even a book. Feel free to suggest further topics (I already have a generation's worth up my sleeve) by emailing me or leaving a comment.
You can read the previous installment of the Grammar Curmudgeon at da Vinci and the next at More or Less
The real lyrics, in case you're too young to remember or perhaps burned out that particular brain cell in the sixties, are "There's a bad moon on the rise" (Creedence Clearwater Revival) and "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" (Jimi Hendrix)
Note: Definitions enclosed in quotation marks are from WordNet 2.0, published to the Web by Princeton University
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