I overheard a conference call in which someone said this a few days ago.<\/p>\n
Problem:<\/strong> Explanation:<\/strong> The word “error” is a noun and not<\/em> a verb.<\/p>\n What the speaker should have used is the word “err”, which looks like “error” but is a verb that means to be mistaken or incorrect<\/em>.<\/p>\n Perhaps the speaker simply mispronounced “err” (the verb) as “error” (the noun).<\/p>\n For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:<\/p>\n This tells me that Web authors have used “err on the safe side” versus “error on the safe side” by a ratio of 18.7-to-1, which is good by not great.<\/p>\n Solution:<\/strong> I overheard a conference call in which someone said this a few days ago. Problem: The speaker used the wrong word for the verb after “We need to” in this statement. Explanation: The speaker who said “We need to error on the safe side.” was discussing a company policy with others on the conference call.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,26,15,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-common-english-blunders","category-mispronunciations","category-nouns","category-verbs"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nThe speaker used the wrong word for the verb after “We need to” in this statement.<\/p>\n
\nThe speaker who said “We need to error on the safe side.” was discussing a company policy with others on the conference call.<\/p>\n\n
\n“We need to err on the side of caution.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"