Malapropisms, Misnomers and Typos – What The Heck??

Your CV, cover letter and application form are often the first steps in any application process, whether it’s for the job of your dreams or to tide you over.

While it’s often stressed how important it is to ensure good spelling and a consistent structure, a shortage in good vacancies is the best time to optimise your CV and really take it to the next level.

You have to assume that the first person to review your CV is a grammar fascist, or maybe just pedantic. They might instead say they are interested in how the detail in your CV indicates your credibility as a candidate. Not just for data critical roles like finance, analysis or marketing, but for any role where detail is, or isn’t, important. Do you want a minor mistake to detract from your meaning or even affect your credibility?

Perhaps they are wrong or unfair, but if it stops you getting to interview, you need to get your wordage right first time.

Spellcheckers and peer reviews are definitely helpful, but really it starts with you and how you write your CV, how you write your cover letter, how you fill in an application on an ATS.

Malapropism* and misnomers– obscure words that you need to understand for what they are and how it applies to your writing:

Malapropism

Definition – mistaken use of a word in place of another similar sounding one, often with amusing effect

Examples, literary and real-life

-       “the pineapple of politeness”, Mrs Malaprop. Perhaps she means “the pinnacle of politeness”

-       “please bare me in mind for this vacancy”. Unless you wish to expose yourself to the wrong kind of #metoo career, you probably mean “bear in mind”

-       “Boris Johnson is really showing his metal”. Should be “Boris Johnson is really showing his mettle”

-       “we have not had any perspective candidates”. Should be “we have not had any prospective candidates”

-       License instead of Licence (or any “ce” or “se” mistake). Many people have a Full Driving License, whereas in fact they hold a Licence and are Licensed to drive. This is confusing for me too, but the best advice I was advised was to use Advice (noun) and Advise (verb) as templates for this form of word.

-       Effect and affect. Get it right! I’ve used both in this article. Probably wrongly.

-       “Fiancé Assistant”. This one is my favourite autocorrect. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which detail led career this candidate started out in. Now an FD.

When you write a CV in Word, or other format, the spellchecker won’t always picked up on words you have incorrectly spelt but are still a word. These are still typos and need to be amended – my wife tells me “form” and “from” are a common issue in her research papers, and I’m sure you’ve scoffed at a newspaper that made a similar mistake. Easy to miss, difficult to forget.

Often malapropisms come about because you hear something, then use it. I’m fundamentally guilty of ruining good songs by using the wrong words when I sing along. We built this city from sausage rolls

Misnomer

Definition – a wrong or inaccurate name, title or designation

Examples

-       “The European Union” an accurate term, but not very precise, given it spans five continents

-       “Koala Bear” not a bear. Given they are stoned it’s understandable they forget they are marsupials

With misnomers, words on CVs are often context specific and what you intend isn’t necessarily how it’s perceived. Equally, many ATS are designed to rank CVs on skill words, so candidates need to understand how their document is processed.

Relevant examples

-       Manager. If you are a Brit working for a US company, you’ll often find it difficult to get a Manager job title unless you are managing people. However, how many Marketing Managers actually manage teams, especially in smaller businesses? One person’s Marketing Associate can be another person’s Marketing Manager.

-       In some cultures, having the title VP is very common. A grandiose way of building credibility, even if you are a VP of only yourself, reporting into no one. Whereas VP, CxO commonly reflect a role within an organisational structure.

-       Generalist vs Specialist. When I talk to HR generalists, many don’t see it as a specialism in its own right. They are actually horizontal HR specialists rather than vertical market specialists in ER, IS or Talent. It’s a problem of definition that many ATS and recruiters have. Rather than describing yourself as an HR Generalist, think about how you want to be perceived, and how you can honestly reflect your skills so that you are ranked highly during CV screen. Here you might use “HR Business Partner with expertise in employee relations (ER), discipline and grievances, information systems (HRIS) and recruitment”, then provide further detail in a skills section

Misnomers are a question of perception vs intent. You need to start thinking in this mindset, then research further on how ATS work (e.g. parsing information) and what first line recruiters look for. Help them do their jobs!

This article isn’t comprehensive. I’m just trying to get you to think about how the words you write are perceived by others. Get into this mode of thinking, keep improving your applications step by step, and they will become a powerful sales document that increases your prospect of an interview.

Want to go further? Look into transadaptation, catachresis and confirmation bias.

Tell me about any funny examples of misused words in the comments section, and also any examples of where the wrong use of a word really broke your concentration. Or hit me with all the typos, malopsics and misnomers I’ve deliberately laced throughout this peer-reviewed article. Thanks for reading!

*Malapropism. I love this word! Comes from Mrs Malaprop, a hysterical character in an 18th century novel, with her name derived from the French for inappropriate (malapropos)