So I finished doing the "Right Words" assignment Friday night and I must say, it has doomed my speech processing. Question 52 on the assignment asks us to decipher between sight, site and cite. I found myself talking to a friend last night about working a job SITE. Although the meaning was understood because of thousands of years of human-to-human voice interaction and the fact that my friend is not an idiot, I began to think, "Which word do I use when it comes time to process that word? Is it sight, site or cite?" Finally I took my own word for it and fell asleep, but when I woke up this morning, I found myself thinking the same thing, only with a different word. I was watching a news story online about Louisiana budget cuts and how they affect (not effect. Wait! Here I go again.) higher education. A news reporter mentioned the protests around Baton Rouge, the capitol of Louisiana. When the reporter said "capitol," I almost threw a fit. "What capitol/al is she talking about?1?!!?! After looking through the text of the story, I found that she was indeed referring to "capitol."
I am just glad that the men and women who developed the modern English language are dead and gone and all we have to do is conform to their rules, because if they were still alive, we would be having many angry conferences about why they insist on having so many words that sound the same with totally different meanings and ways to use them.
I really felt that this assignment helps a lot. There are several words that are erroneously placed such as affect/effect, lay/lie, principal/principle. How important it is as a writer and editor to know which are the correct words to use.
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