Author: Kirk

“He sites the following historic quotes …”

Misspellings, Verbs

I saw this recently on a website.

Problem:
The writer used the wrong verb.

Explanation:
The full sentence was “He sites the following historic quotes regarding Thanksgiving.”

The verb “site” — spelled S-I-T-E — means to place, situate or locate at or on a site.

It is clear that the writer of the sentence was trying to say “refers to” when he wrote “site” with an “s”.

So the writer should have used the verb “cite” — spelled C-I-T-E — which means to quote, especially as an authority.

Solution:
“He cites the following historic quotes …”

OnlyWire

General

I promised on the first anniversary of KirkMahoney.com that I would look at ways to make this website more useful to you.

One way is to make it easier for you to share what I write with friends and family.

The OnlyWire “BOOKMARK & SHARE” button that now appears on all pages uses a technology that supports this.

This complements the “ShareThis” button found on many pages and gives you a choice about which social-networking technology to use — ShareThis or OnlyWire.

The advantage of ShareThis is that you need not have a ShareThis account to submit content to a particular social-networking site such as Digg or Furl.

The advantage of OnlyWire is that you can simultaneously submit content to as many social-networking sites as you have registered with OnlyWire.

As explained at the OnlyWire website, the OnlyWire “BOOKMARK & SHARE” button lets you automatically and simultaneously submit Web content to all of your social bookmarking sites, including:

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Even more instantaneously, the OnlyWire “BOOKMARK & SHARE” button lets you email notifications about what you are reading to friends and family.

And the OnlyWire “BOOKMARK & SHARE” button lets you save any page you see here as a private bookmark in your Google Bookmarks account while you simultaneously share the page with social-networking sites.

I hope that you find this change helpful. If you have other ideas for how to improve KirkMahoney.com, please let me know through my contact form!

“ALWAYS VISABLE”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Misspellings

I saw this on a website.

Problem:
The adjective is misspelled — in capital letters, no less!

Explanation:
The adjective “visible” — misspelled as V-I-S-A-B-L-E — appeared in a banner advertisement on the MEN7 website, which I discovered after seeing a television program called “MEN7” on the ION network a few nights ago.

The website’s banner ad was for something called “Billionaires Car Club”.

The full text of the all-capital-letters ad was “LAMBORGHINI, MURCIELAGO | PRICE TO OWN $350K | ALWAYS VISABLE | SEE IT ON BILLIONAIRES CAR CLUB”.

I was not surprised to see the adjective “visible” misspelled by a website and TV program focused on fast cars and the male equivalent of “Cosmopolitan” magazine instead of on more intellectual pursuits.

But seeing the adjective “visible” spelled with an “a” in the middle made me wonder how typical this blunder was.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “visible” — 238,000,000 matches
  • “visable” — 723,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spelling versus the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 329-to-1, which is superb.

However, nearly three-quarters of a million misspellings tells me that spelling the adjective “visible” with an “a” is a common English blunder.

I believe that this blunder is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

It is simpler to pronounce this adjective as if there were an “a” in the middle than to clearly pronounce the “i” in the middle.

And I believe that this mispronunciation drives the misspelling.

Solution:
“ALWAYS VISIBLE”