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List of commonly misused English words. This is a list of English words that are thought to be commonly misused. It is meant to include only words whose misuse is deprecated by most usage writers, editors, and professional grammarians defining the norms of Standard English. It is possible that some of the meanings marked non-standard may pass ...
Avalency. In linguistics and grammar, Avalency refers to the property of a predicate, often a verb, taking no arguments. Valency refers to how many and what kinds of arguments a predicate licenses —i.e. what arguments the predicate selects grammatically. [1] Avalent verbs are verbs which have no valency, meaning that they have no logical ...
AHD4 notes that this usage was acceptable to "almost half" of the usage panel, while most opposed the word's use as a verb. M-W mentions no usage problems, listing the disputed meaning second to its legal sense without comment. OED cites the non-legal noun and verb usages as colloquial and "orig[inally] U.S.". Chambers deems this use "colloquial".
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be ...
Thesaurus. A thesaurus ( pl.: thesauri or thesauruses ), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms ...
The jussive ( abbreviated JUS) is a grammatical mood of verbs for issuing orders, commanding, or exhorting (within a subjunctive framework). English verbs are not marked for this mood. The mood is similar to the cohortative mood, which typically applies to the first person by appeal to the object's duties and obligations, [citation needed] and ...
In this case, "some people" are a vague and undefined authority. In rhetoric, a weasel word, or anonymous authority, is a word or phrase aimed at creating an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said, when in fact only a vague, ambiguous, or irrelevant claim has been communicated. The terms may be considered informal.
Gullibility. Illustration by Peter Newell for the poem "The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven" ( Fables for the Frivolous) by Guy Wetmore Carryl. Gullibility is a failure of social intelligence in which a person is easily tricked or manipulated into an ill-advised course of action. It is closely related to credulity, which is the tendency ...