I Advise You to Take My Advice on This …

Have you noticed that many of these newsletters focused on the … shall we say … “confusion” between two words that sound alike but have different meanings?

Even though I’m making a distinction between them, my text is still subject to correction by Grammarly and MS Word. So I started wondering if it’s not so much that writers are using the incorrect word. They use the right word, but their grammar checker suggests the other. The writer takes the suggested edit and moves on. Or maybe the program changes the word on its own, and the writer doesn’t catch it in proof.

Anyway, I’m curious to know what you think. Do you question your word choices if a program flags one of them?

So let’s look at another couple of words that I often see confused, advice, and advise. (Ha, betcha didn’t see that comin’ huh? ??) Oh, and MS Word just advised me to change “advise” to “advice”, despite the fact that advice had already been used in the sentence! So did Grammarly.

Advice is a noun. It is something you give.

Advise is a verb. It is the act of giving advice.

Is there an easy way to make sure you’re using the right one? I’ve been going around and around in my head about this. At first, I thought, oh, advise is a verb, just remember the v is for verb! Uh, no. They both have vees. Darn.

Now I’m trying to come up with a difference between “vice” and “vise” that correlates to their word types. And I’m drawing a big, fat, duck egg. Do you have any ideas? Let’s talk about them in the comments!

Vocabulary Word:? Lexeme

A tip of my writer’s cap to Chris Milham for using it in his newsletter subject line today, “Lexeme Blunders”. I knew “lex” had something to do with words, but other than that, I didn’t know what it meant. I later learned that it comes from the Ancient Greek word lexis.

I looked at five different online dictionaries. Got five long-winded, tongue-twisting definitions. But what they all boil down to, a lexeme is a word or group of words.

Granted, it’s more nuanced than just “word”. But isn’t that what makes language, of any translation or dialect, so powerful? How many words do we have for “word”? And if Chris had used “Word Blunders” for a subject line instead, would it have been as intriguing?

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Tuesday.