Sunday, January 26, 2025

Besides "to exercise" and "to exorcise," what other word pairs are there where one slight misspelling makes the action much worse or much better than the other?

 

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Besides "to exercise" and "to exorcise," what other word pairs are there where one slight misspelling makes the action much worse or much better than the other?

⭐️ Vocabulary / Semantics

And can you share us some funny stories about situations where they meant a certain word, but the slight misspelling of that word turned out to be the correct spelling of another word, and that misspelling made the situation much more hilarious than it would have otherwise been?

Also, some creepy stories where the slight misspelling of a word made the situation much creepier than it otherwise would have been?

 

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[–]FledgyApplehandsNative Speaker 17 points  

Orgasm and Organism is a common one to mess up in Biology class

[–]Logical-Recognition3Native Speaker 3 points  

My wife taught high school biology and each year she let the students put anonymous questions in a box and she would pull them out and answer them. Each year she would get questions about "organisms" which she would answer with a straight face.

[–]badwhiskey63Native Speaker US Northeast 13 points  

In my field, the classic one is public and pubic.

[–][deleted] 8 points  

Here is one of my family stories. It was the early 1990’s. I was about 13 years old and my sister was about 9 years old. It was summer, and we were pretty much allowed to stay awake as long as we didn’t bother our parents.

We didn’t have cable, just broadcast television. That meant at night, we mostly had infomercials and old movies to watch. 

Well, one night my sister was watching TV, and I went to bed. The next morning, my sister was exhausted! My mother asked her why she was so tired, and my sister said she’d stayed up super late to watch “The Exorcist!” My mother was very upset with me, and couldn’t understand why I thought it was so funny. My sister had been watching infomercials for “Sweatin’ to the Oldies”. 

Yes, my sister called Richard Simmons the “exercist.”

[–]IwannaAskSomeStuffNew Poster 3 points  

Of dumb fond memories I have, infomercial nights of the 90s is in the list, lol!

[–]Jakiller33Native Speaker 1 point  

These pairs have similar meanings (aside from desert and dessert), though they're still important to get right.

[–]IwannaAskSomeStuffNew Poster 1 point  

I make that typo so often, makes massively inconveniently confusing mistakes

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[–]King_KezzaNew Poster 2 points  

Mag with an f is a cigarette. Maggot with an f is a kind of meatball made from leftover pork. In the UK, that is

[–]hdhxuxufxufufiffifNew Poster 2 points  

Specifically leftover fatty cuts of meat and offal, wrapped in caul fat.

[–]KerflumpieEnglish Teacher 1 point  

Perfectly ordinary words, but not allowed in Words With Friends.

[–]SnooDonuts6494🇬🇧 English Teacher 0 points  

I'm curious as to why you are mincing that oath; is "fag" truly obscene in America today? Surely it's dependent on context?

I think it's just a funny exaggerated joke about English people mistakenly asking for "a fag" (cigarette), like Americans suggesting we store our money "in our fanny".

It's fun, but ffs, let's not get hung up on this stuff. It's not "obscene". Discrimination is obscene. Using words in other ways isn't.

Context.

I eat faggots for breakfast. I do not call my gay friends faggots.

I retard my carburettor. People with learning difficulties are not retarded.

Context.

[–]TheMagicQuackersNative Speaker 🇦🇺 0 points  

just to clarify the term is similar to hag NOT the other way round

[–]SnooDonuts6494🇬🇧 English Teacher 0 points  

What?

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