Category Archives: Language use

I’m going to admit now, because there are things that all of us editors have to look up (right? Please share! Better to check than be wrong) and this is one of the ones I have had trouble with in the past and have had to commit to memory. Which one means the most important and which one means the first performance?

Premier means the first in importance or order, and this extends to being used for a head of state (in Australia and Canada, it’s the official title for the chief minister of a state or government, everywhere else it can be used to denote the head of state, “The British premier stated that …”).

A premiere is the first showing of a film or the first performance of a musical work or play. So you go to a film premiere, not a film premier.

Premium has several meanings, one of which is superior and usually more expensive – premium cat food, for example (a premium is also the amount you pay for insurance or a sum added to a normal sum in order to get something better).

You can find more troublesome pairs here, and here’s the index to them all!

I was asked about this one by my lovely friend Linda, a good friend and a super editor, too. It’s sometimes hard to think up new troublesome pairs to write about, so I love it when people suggest them to me, often because they’ve encountered someone else confusing them, sometimes for themselves (it’s the former in Linda’s case).

To breach something (the verb) means to make a hole in it OR to break something like an agreement or a law, or simply a code of conduct. A breach (the noun) is the result of someone breaching something: it’s the act of breaking an agreement or a law (a breach of conduct) or a gap or hole in a wall or other barrier. “By wearing jeans in the dining room, he breached the club’s formal dress policy”. It’s often used in a military sense, but in a general one, too.

The breech (noun only) is the part of a cannon, gun or rifle barrel that is behind the bore. The old-fashioned use of the word means a person’s buttocks, but this survives chiefly in the term “a breech birth” which occurs when a baby is turned around in the womb so that its bottom or feet emerge first.

Breeches (which that last sense of breech comes from) are short trousers, ending just below the knee, which are nowadays used in ceremonial or riding dress.

Breaches are multiple gaps in a wall, etc. or multiple infringements of policy and laws.

You can find more troublesome pairs here, and here’s the index to them all!

Another troublesome pair from near the end of the alphabet – and while we’re talking about alphabets, I’ll admit now (and sadly it will probably be true for any future readers, too; you’ll be amazed how many people search for these pairs years after I posted them) that I’m a bit behind with updating the index. However, if you use the Search feature (under menu on a mobile or in the right-hand column on a desktop) you will be able to find all of them.

OK, venal vs. venial.

If you are venal, it means you are susceptible to bribery, for example a corrupt politician or town planner.

Venial is quite different: it is used in a Christian context to describe a sin which is not seen as removing divine grace from the soul. It has therefore also come to mean, by extension, slight or pardonable, although I can’t personally recall seeing it used in this way in a non-religious context (or without any reference to religion) and I would advise using slight or pardonable instead if you want to use it in a secular context unless you’re very sure your audience will understand it.

Additional point: venial sins are contrasted with mortal sins, which are terrible, grave sins which do deprive the soul of divine grace.

You can find more troublesome pairs here, and here’s the index to them all!

I had always assumed that there was just one word for a row of grass or other cereal crop as it falls as it’s mown, or a broad area of land, also used by extension for a broad area of anything (swathes of the English-speaking population use swathe and not swath), but then swath started cropping up in both the newspaper and the current affairs magazine I read regularly (which do not share a publisher, although some journalists write for both).

To me, personally, “swath” sounds wrong when I read it (this is where I find out not everyone hears the words in their head, like when I found out that not everyone gets earworms (uninvited music playing in your head). I’ve always pronounced the word to rhyme with “bathe”, with the “a” that’s in “cave”, presumably because I first saw it written as “swathe” and applied the rule that an “e” at the end of a word lengthens the vowel. “Swath” reads to me with a harder “the” and the “shortened”, so like the beginning part of “gather” (this is hard without using linguistic pronunciations symbols!) although I suppose you could read it with the same vowel as “bath” or even “swatch”.

As the dictionaries I consult for this series (primarily Oxford and Merriam-Webster) both say you can use either swathe or swath, I’m guessing that which you use depends on which you first saw and read and thus the way you pronounce it. I’d love to know which you use and how you pronounce it!

Oh, and if you like this kind of stuff, I can highly recommend Kory Stamper’s new book “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries”. I’ve not finished it yet, but, oh, it’s just marvellous. There’s a photo on my book review blog here and a review will appear on the blog in due course.

You can find more troublesome pairs here, and here’s the index to them all!

I do like a -us or -ous distinction that’s not just talking about American versus British English, and, well, enjoyed wouldn’t be quite the right term, would it, did some writing about this when I covered mucus or mucous. So here’s another pair of words that sound and are spelled almost the same but don’t mean the same, and you wouldn’t really want to mix them up, would you!

Viscus, it turns out (I didn’t know this off the top of my head. One of the most important rules of being an editor is know when to look things up, and I always check even the ones I think I know in several resources before posting these articles) – is the singular form of the word viscera (which is the word for the internal organs, particularly those in the abdomen).

Viscous describes the state between being a liquid and being a solid: a thick stickiness. Ugh. When I did a search to make sure I hadn’t written about this before, the results came up with my mucus or mucous and unguent or ungulant articles. I think I’ll write about something sere and dry and non-sticky next …

You can find more troublesome pairs here, and here’s the index to them all!

This troublesome pair originated from the common misconception that there is such a word as stentorous, which is something to do with loud speaking or breathing. I’ve seen and heard this used, but in fact, it’s not a word at all! The word people are looking for there is stentorious, and the word they are probably being affected by when they think about it is stertorous.

Let’s sort out these two words that do actually exist, then.

Stentorious (or, indeed stentorian, which is listed in the Oxford Concise Dictionary at the expense of stentorious, but I reckon I’ve never come across) is used to describe a person’s voice, or the sound they emit, as being loud and powerful. Stentorious and stentorian are both listed in the Oxford Dictionaries online resource (which you can find here). I suppose stentorian might be marginally easier to spell, but in this case it seems a bit odd to have two words meaning exactly the same, even though I usually like that kind of thing.

Stertorous sounds pretty similar AND means a pretty similar (though not exactly matching) thing – it describes laboured and noisy breathing. I do like this distinction and think it’s important.

So stentorious or stentorian for vocal expression, stertorous for breathing, and stentorous for neither of them, because it doesn’t exist (but I bet a lot of people look it up!.

Do comment if you found this article because you looked up stentorous! Thank you!

You can find more troublesome pairs here, and here’s the index to them all!