Saturday, December 04, 2004

Pet peeve of the month: people who use "purposefully" when they mean "purposely" or "on purpose." The latter is to do something deliberately; the former, to do something with a specific goal in mind. You purposely leave the door open; you purposefully leave the door open because the UPS guy is ten feet behind you and you want to ease their passage into the room. The two words are not synonymous. This mistake is all over several blogs and message boards and is now beginning to infiltrate everyday, non-online speech; I've heard two different people do it in the past week. STOP THE MADNESS, PEOPLE! update: Dave Segal from The Stranger just pointed out that in Rod Smith's recent review of David Toop's Haunted Weather in SW, there's a misuse of the word "fulsome"--Rod means it positively, in a cup-runneth-over sense, but it actually means something is disgusting for its excess. Whoops--can't win 'em all. And by all means, keep these coming. This is your blogosphere/critical realm, after all--let's all keep it clean.