teatea

this is a nitpicky thing. nobody should get too upset about it: the word chai actully just means "tea." whenever you hear an utterance of "chai tea," you are really hearing "tea tea." most asian languages refer to all tea as just "chai" and what americans call chai tea (the spiced stuff) is actually masala chai. its just a cool word, so we should not get too pedantic.

homning

Artwork by rocketpigeon.net

i used to confuse these all the time:

• hone - to sharpen or get better e.g. "hone your skills"
• home - get closer and closer to a target e.g. "homing missile/pigeon"

so i need to stop using the phrase "honing in"...

adversity aversion

the words adverse and averse can cause confusion and are often erroneously interchanged. Both are adjectives with negative meanings, but they are not interchangeable; they are subtly differentiated by interest vs inclination:

• adverse (adj) - unfavorable. used in the "against one's best interest" case. base word for adversity and adversary.
  
• averse (adj) - having repugnance or opposition of mind. used in the "against one's personal inclinations" case. base word for aversion.

these derived words (adversity/aversion) are the best mnemonic for deciding which to use, and have cured me of my bad habit of saying things like "I am not adverse to medicine with no averse effects."

sherbe(r)t

internationally, the words sherbet and sorbet are synonymous. the united states colloquially refers to something different with each term. sorbet is seen as a dessert similar to italian ice (i.e. no dairy) while sherbet is both fruity and creamy (due to minimal dairy content)

what is interesting is how (anecdotally) everyone learns that this dessert is called "sherbeRt" with an extra /r/ sound. this has become an aceptable and understandable mispronunciation, but is technically not the right name. if you are like me and only ever learned to call it sherbert, look at the package next time you are at the grocery store and it mght surprise you that they leave out that /r/.

glamorous pompadour

Madame Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour preceded the footsteps of Ambrose B. Burnside, Jheri Redding, and A Flock of Seagulls in leaving an eponymous hairstyle as a legacy.

The pompadour is the poof of hair made famous by elvis and sported by many subcultures today.

This odd departure from the normal linguisteresis fare is brought on by the confusion over what the king of the cosmos is referring to when he mentions that he lost his pompadour during a knife fight in the video game we ♥ katamari (part of the katamari damacy series, which means literally "clump spirit")

[via]

semicolons can be confusing; here is a lesson ;)

the oatmeal, famous for lengthy animated rants of the surreal variety such as how to use an apostrophe, has created a new lesson on a less commonly used punctuation mark: the semicolon.

the comic uses non-sequiturs to break down the uses of the semicolon, with the main reasons being:

• conjoining two related sentences that could stand on their own (do not use a conjunction such as 'and' or 'but' with this use)
• adding more pause than a comma but less than a period.
• seperating items in a list when those items already have punction (e.g. i have lived in lakeville, mn; edina, mn; and minneapolis, mn.)

the comic neglects to mention some other uses for the symbol, such as ending a line of code in many computer programming languages or a line of a matrix in a mathematical matrix. also a winky face.

[image by theoatmeal]

well, yeah

a cliché is a predictable unoriginality - when what may have been a neat idea in the past is now overdone.

the opposite of a cliché is a non-sequitur: something that has never been done before and is accomplished with a completely absurd disjointedness in relation. non-sequitur is a latin phrase literally meaning "does not follow," and is most often used with humorous intent (as a major subset of surrealist humor)

a common example of a non-sequitur is the following joke:

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Fish.

i submit that if this joke is used too often, it will become a cliché. The logical name for this transformation would just be "sequitur" meaning "it does follow [convention]," but perhaps a better name would be "sequiché." your move, ADS.