You Keep Using That Word—vol. 9: More Words You’re Probably Using Wrong

Many years ago, while living in Manhattan, I was out one night with a girlfriend who’d had a bit too much to drink.

One of the Ivy League/Wall Street–type guys who’d been talking to us over the course of the evening—and steadily buying her drinks—was moving in on my friend hard even as she grew progressively less clear-minded, and eventually I intervened and suggested we go. Her lothario proceeded to press her to stay, and finally I said, “Hey, buddy, leave her alone; it’s not happening for you.”

To which he turned his ire fully on me and said angrily, “Mind your own business. You’re a virago.”

“And you’re not going home with her tonight,” I retorted. “But points for vocabulary.”

Which goes to show you that correct word usage can truly elevate any conversation.

That brings us back to familiar stomping grounds: Join me for installment nine of our picayune exploration of language and grammar, won’t you?

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I relate this story (not relay, unless I’m passing it along as a message from someone else) as a vivid example of how knowing which word to use when can make a big difference in the clarity and effectiveness of your prose.

Yet to come up with a list of words that over the course of my editing career I commonly see confused and misused I don’t even have to rack my brain, as in strain and stretch it—not wrack as in to damage or destroy something, because I’m confident I’m not doing any neurological damage when searching for answers in my mind. I mean, if that were possible it’d be nerve-racking—meaning painful or torturous—although admittedly dictionaries these days do allow for the possibility that you may mean it might also wreck or ruin your nerves, in which case nerve-wracking has become accepted vernacular (although it puts my nerves through a wringer to see the latter—never a ringer).

Luckily that night with my friend’s would-be Romeo I managed to eke out a victory (not eek it out, unless I’d seen one of New York’s ample rat population at the same time) and he and his friends dispersed, but not until they’d disbursed money to the server for the no doubt impressive bar tab they’d run up.

Honestly they were probably okay guys under normal circumstances, their leeching onto (attaching) my friend and trying to leach…