Friday's English Language Lesson #6**

[ajva]

To shore up interest in my little series of lexical vignettes, I shall henceforth offer a small prize for the first person to spot a typo in an installment. Alas, this will not apply retrospectively, although I have left my howler of a fortnight ago unedited as it is amusing.


The prize will be an item of fruit of the winner's choice, decorated in a whimsical style of my choosing.


Anyway, to the business at hand - and briefly, today, as this one should be so damnably easy to grasp that even a lemon on a stick could manage it.

Are you interested to find out what it is? Well, perhaps not. Perhaps you're uninterested. What you won't fucking be is DISinterested. After all, my postings here are pretty one-sided so it doesn't give you much of a chance to be impartial.

Anne's top tip:
uninterested = not interested
disinterested = impartial

An uninterested referee would make for a chaotic game of football. A disinterested one, though, is just what you need.

If you use "disinterested" for "uninterested" in my presence, and I suspect you have read this, I will think you very stupid indeed.

Sleep tight.

Comments

[adjectivegail]

I can find no typos in this installment.

[booklectica]

Nor I. Damn. I wanted an amusingly-decorated piece of fruit.

[adjectivegail]

I know, me too :(

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

This one is a bit of a bugbear for me, in that I spent about 20 years getting it wrong, before having the difference pointed out to me relatively recently, so I do still occasionally catch myself doing it. I do have the grace to be embarrassed about it though...

(and I couldn't spot any mistakes either)

[djm4]

I don't agree. I don't have any financial or other stake in what your topic of the day is, so I could indeed be said to be disinterested, however interested in it I am. If I'd taken out a bet in Ladbrokes that your topic today would be the distinction between "uninterested" and "disinterested", then I couldn't truthfully claim to be disinterested, but I didn't so I can.

It would, however, be a fairly bizarre aspect of your post to comment on, akin to expressing surprise that it wasn't written in six-foot-high crimson aerosol spray paint on Moorgate Station: true, but hardly a defining feature of the post.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Though not strictly relating to a typo, I believe that this is a decorated-fruit-worthy observation...

[ajva.livejournal.com]

Sadly, my Friday's English Language Lessons are my own personal banana republic. By which I mean not that there will be amusingly decorated bananas everywhere, but that I make the rules. :o)

Typos only.

[djm4]

Typos only.

Which, obviously, is not a ruling that I'm disinterested in. ;-)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Ah well. I shall have to hope too find another howler in that case :-)

[envoy.livejournal.com]

If you use "disinterested" for "uninterested" in my presence, and I suspect you have read this, I will think you very stupid indeed.

No pressure eh? Well I'm glad you warned me at least, I've already managed to forget the first 5, I shall have to make an extra effort to incorporate this one. I wouldn't want you to think I'm uninterested or anything ;-)

[ajva.livejournal.com]

Good lad. No, as you say, pressure. :o)

[jhg.livejournal.com]

I am frankly amazed that no-one else has yet spotted the typo, as I noticed it instantly.

It is, of course, a common misspelling of the word which I have reproduced in bold type below.

I shall henceforth offer a small prize for the first person to spot a typo in an installment.

'Instalment' has but one 'l'.

Later,


J

[ajva.livejournal.com]

Nope. Both are correct, although my spelling is the more commonly used. If you don't believe me, dictionary.com will set you straight.

Better luck next time.

[jhg.livejournal.com]

dictionary.com is an international English dictionary, not an English English one. You may be correct, but you cannot cite it as a source. Use a proper English dictionary, like Oxford or Collins.

According to Collins English Dictionary 2000 edition:

instalment, or U.S. installment, [...] 2 a portion of something that is issued, broadcast, or published in parts, such as a serial in a magazine.

I wish you greater felicity with your subsequent sally.

J