Monthly Archives: October 2012

Let’s look at some commonly-confused pairs of words, and the differences between them.

premiere vs. premier – A “premiere” is the first showing of a play, movie, etc. A “premier” is a high-ranking government officer, sometimes equivalent to a prime minister. The Premier of China decided not to attend the premiere of Taken 2, on account of its suckage.

sympathy vs. empathy – “Sympathy” means feeling for someone, while “empathy” means feeling with someone. If you sympathize with someone’s suffering, you pity them, but if you empathize, you actually put yourself in their shoes and feel a little of what they’re feeling. I sympathized with him for having seen Taken 2, but since I hadn’t seen the film myself, I couldn’t really empathize.

decry vs. descry – To “decry” something is to denounce or condemn it. Obama and Romney have been decrying each other’s policies for months now. Totally unrelated is “descry,” which means that you see something unclear by looking carefully – for example, you might descry Waldo in a picture after a moment of hunting. Unable to descry even a hint of originality in Taken 2, the critic decried its director, its writer, and whoever came up with that breathtaking title.

affect vs. effect – This pair’s especially tricky, since both words have multiple meanings. “Affect” typically means to influence, so if a hurricane affects your travel plans, it means your plans changed because of the storm. “Effect,” on the other hand, is typically a noun, as in “cause and effect.” Watching Taken 2 affected me deeply: its effects included nausea and clinical depression. However, “affect” can also mean to pretend, as in “The girl from Pakistan affected a Norwegian accent.” And “effect” can be a verb, meaning to cause an effect, as in “Our presentation effected a major shift in their policy.”

ensure vs. insure – In general, “ensure” means to make sure, so for instance, you might take good care of your car to ensure it doesn’t break down. On the other hand, “insure” generally means to guarantee against harm, so if you insure your car, you’re guaranteeing that you’ll get repaid if your car does break down. My insurance policy doesn’t refund ticket prices for bad movies, so I’ll just have to ensure that I don’t see Taken 2. But just to make things even more confusing, the dictionary says “insure” and “ensure” can also take each other’s meanings. I wouldn’t recommend it.

What words do you get confused?

…or depressed, or lonely, or anxious, or angry, or hating yourself. This technique works on any negative emotion.

But let’s talk about fear.

Fear is a remarkably universal experience. It doesn’t just happen with big things, like a hurricane slamming the East Coast. It’s ever-present in everyday life, in small doses and large. Fear of disappointing someone. Nervousness over giving a presentation. Worry that you’ve offended a friend. Even when we’re happy, fear seeps into so many ordinary moments that it starts to feel normal. Often we don’t even notice it.

When we do, what happens?

There are two common responses to fear: fight it, or run from it.

Running from it is easier, but of course that just turns a life full of fear into a life full of running. Avoiding fear makes the thing we fear loom larger and darker, and constrains us to huddle in a little ball where we feel safe and comfortable. Except that long-term, you can never really escape, so you just end up feeling afraid all the time.

Fighting it is certainly better, but this approach has its own problems. Casting fear as an adversary to be battled means setting yourself up for a lifetime of battles. You vs. Fear, Round 879. Even if you can conquer one specific fear (and you definitely can), there’s always the next monster to face. Waging a neverending battle can leave you exhausted, and your failures can make you feel like you’re a failure, too.

Fight it, or run from it. But there’s a third path.

Accept your fear.

This doesn’t mean surrendering, letting the fear dominate you. Nor does it mean calling it out, demanding it submit. Accepting your fear means giving yourself the freedom to really experience it for the first time, examining the feeling, swishing it around in your head and savoring it like a fine merlot. Despite a lifetime of running from or fighting this adversary, how often do we stop and ask what it really is? How does it really feel?

Breathe it in. Experience its sensations. A slight nausea, perhaps. A tightness in the chest. A tensing of the muscles. Take stock of your physical reactions. Take a good, hard look at the monster, and give it license to roam. Watch what it does.

Try this, and you just might find that the monster loses some of its power. It’s used to chasing and sparring; it is unaccustomed to being a houseguest, awkward in its manners. It is no longer as dark as it once was.

This technique won’t make the fear go away. That isn’t the point. You’ll still be afraid, at least for now; there’s no quick fix to that. But it’s possible to transform fear from a crushing weight into something lighter, something that flows into you freely and then back out again.

Try it sometime. See what you think.

How do you handle your fear?

Click to enlarge.

Me as Two-Face. Yes, I am freakishly tall. The costume is homemade, and 95% my wife’s work. Love it! That scepter in the background belonged to a girl who dressed up as the singer from the Do You Wanna Date My Avatar video.

My wife, Betsy, rocking the Supergirl costume. The skeleton’s diggin’ it too.

My third and final poster: the scarecrow.

As you can see, we did not suffer from a shortage of alcohol. Or, in this case, Liquid Shadow.

The Cauldron. (It was apple cider.)

Putting the “moan” back in Mona Lisa. You’d be surprised the stuff you can find at Kroger.

The not-so-itsy-bitsy spider, checking out our spooky screensaver. Poe’s feathered henchman keeps things classy up top.

Artoo gets into the holiday spirit. We put black lights in the kitchen.

At first I thought these were just meatballs with olive slices that my wife made. Turns out? Actual ogre eyes. Delicious.

I uploaded my library to the Web. HA! omg do you get it

Good time had by all. We got about a dozen guests, with costumes including Nyan Cat, the Do You Wanna Date My Avatar girl, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Lara Croft, The Dude from The Big Lebowski, a nerd drag queen, and a Scotsman in a kilt. I’ve got photos of them too, but I’m not going to put them on the blog, because I don’t want to be That Guy.

How about you? Doing anything fun for Halloween?

English is infamous for being hard to pronounce. In many other languages, like Spanish, Russian, and Japanese, each vowel makes pretty much one sound always, and that’s the end of it. In English, each vowel has a short sound and a long sound at a minimum: for example, “e” has a short sound in “net” and a long sound in “bleed.” And the short and long sounds don’t even half cover it. You’ve got the silent “e” (in “mime”), the schwa “e” (in “concatenation”), the long-A “e” (in “fiance”), and countless other sounds.

Our vowels are so rebellious, we can’t even decide which letters are vowels. What’s the formula we memorize? “A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.” Chalk one up for consistency.

Our consonants, on the other hand, are pretty well-behaved. “A” may be all over the map, but “B” is solid and dependable.

Right?

It turns out, our language is even more rebellious than you might imagine. About a month ago, I was reading The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, and I came across this astonishing claim: not a single letter in the English alphabet can be relied upon for a consistent pronunciation.

Because I’m the nerdy OCD sort, I decided to test this out. On my own at first, and then enlisting Google for help, I went through all twenty-six letters. For each one, I tried to find two different words that showcase an inconsistent pronunciation for that letter. Which, by the way, was a lot harder than it might sound. For example, without looking at the list, see if you can think of an answer for “Z.”

Here’s what I came up with:

A – happy, maybe
B – ball, debt
C – cat, fleece
D – dog, Wednesday
E – net, bleed
F – fluffy, of
G – great, generous
H – hippo, honor
I – igloo, rite
J – judge, marijuana
K – kill, knowledge
L – log, quesadilla
M – mace, mnemonic
N – near, column
O – brood, office
P – papa, photo
Q – inquire, clique
R – rope, sommelier
S – sale, shift
T – tussle, thimble
U – umbrella, used
V – ???
W – wide, wry
X – fox, xylophone
Y – yellow, cry
Z – zoo, rendezvous

I came up with something for every letter but V. That’s not to say that V is consistent either, just that I couldn’t seem to find a counterexample.

In many cases (like “debt” and “Wednesday”) the alternate pronunciation was simply silence. That’s certainly a form of inconsistency.

You might be tempted to complain that some of these words (“quesadilla,” “sommelier”) don’t really count, because they’re foreign words borrowed into English. As you complain, though, remember that “complain” was itself borrowed from the Old French “complaindre.” Most of our language is borrowed, in fact. No reason to be hard on the new recruits – regardless of origin, it’s all English now.

We just don’t know how to pronounce it.