Friday's English Language Lesson #2 ****

[ajva]

Welcome back, you happy campers.

Today, we examine the difference between the words "effect" and "affect". I think this one's a bit tricky to get your head around at first (as opposed to, say, not putting apostrophes in plurals, which is really fucking easy when it comes down to it), so we'll be introducing a stars system of difficulty. This one rates four stars out of five.

It's tricky because both words can be used either as a noun or as a verb, some of the meanings interlink, and often we don't distinguish the initial vowels when we say them out loud.

Here's the deal:

As nouns:
effect: a change produced by a cause; a result
affect: mood (psychological term e.g. bipolar depression is a disorder of affect.)

As verbs:
effect: to make happen
affect: to have an effect on something (Awooga Awooga - there's the other word. This is why people get confused, I think.); to put on a show of (e.g. to affect an accent)

With these posts, I hope to affect people's attitudes and indeed effect a change in people's lexical choices, but effectively I am preaching to the converted and, in effect, I am surely delusional; the long-term effect of this will be that I am doomed to suffer affective disorder of increasing severity as the weeks go by.

Comments

[aegidian]

Affectionately appreciated!

[adjectivegail]

A couple of years ago ciphergoth posted a really lovely piece about affecting an accent (I think?) in order to have an effect... I can't remember what he said but it was great.

Please, miss, would you teach us the differences between colons and semicolons? It drives me nuts...

[ajva.livejournal.com]

Thanks for reminding me of that definition of "affect"! Entry duly edited...

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

If you can explain why making huge long run-on sentences with commas is bad, I'd be grateful - I never managed to explain that one well.

[inanimatepeanut.livejournal.com]

Hehe, the complicated usage of these terms inspires within me a happy, smug affect. The English gods must have wanted to effect a clear distinction between the ignorant and clever, the unintended effect of which was pure pleasure for grammar snobs like myself. After saying that, I sure hope I didn't overlook some glaring grammatical error here, thus affecting everyone's opinion of me and inspiring negative affects in those I see in the future.

P.S. Can we do who and whom next week; I don't know why but that one annoys me.

P.P.S. You might want to give jhg a private lesson on the usage of 'your' vs. 'you're' re: one of his recent posts. lol- uh huh jhg, of course it was a typo- we know ;-).

[conflux.livejournal.com]

affect: to have an effect on something

When I was writing my Thesis I was told not to use this one as it is considered to be outdated by many people and effect should just be used in it's place. Mind you I was also told to spell many words with an 's' rather than a 'z' because it was the Cambridge rather than the Oxford spelling.

[adjectivegail]

When I came to the UK I was told that a lot of my spellings were incorrect because I spelt with a 'z' (which, btw, is "zee", not "zed"!) instead of an 's' and missed out the 'u' in 'colour' and 'favour', etc. I'm not sure what you were told were corrections of wrong spellings so much as the English versions rather than the American versions. To my mind, it doesn't matter which you use so long as you're consistent.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

It just goes to show you how tricky this one is, because whoever told you that was just plain old wrong. They are completely different words.

Oh - and, of course, you meant "its", not "it's". Don't make me do apostrophes. ;o)

[conflux.livejournal.com]

Ok I confess I did the "it's" on purpose to see if you were paying attention. I should be ashamed of myself really ;-)

I think it was my supervisor who told me and he should really have known better. Most of the time though I have to admit that I don’t really care very much about such things as long as I get what I mean across.