QT 23 – Video Transcript and Bonus Info
Welcome to 2-Minute Tuesday and another QuickTake with Cate.
So which would you select as the correct word in this sentence (all of these are actual words): caret, carat, karat, or carrot?
Benjamin Bunny decided to bring his mother the heaviest _____________ he could find.
Ooh, that’s an answer worth waiting for—or is it weighting?
As an editor, I have to catch errors that grammar and spell check miss. Often writers have no idea that the word they used is not the word they meant, either in meaning or in spelling or both. For example, there’s peak and there’s pique; affect and effect; principle and principal; advice and advise; to, too, and two; bear and bare; due to and do to; regimen and regiment; kernel and colonel; counsel, council, and consul; site, sight, and cite; and the list goes on. And on and on. And that’s the trouble!
Two of the most commonly confused sets of words I see as an editor are lead and led and insure, ensure, and assure.
The noun lead, which rhymes with head, is a soft metal used in pencils and other items. The verb led is pronounced the same way as a pencil lead, but it is the past tense of the verb lead, which means to guide or direct and rhymes with deed. When describing a project on your resume, you would write, “I led a team last year.”
To remember the differences between insure and ensure, use insure for a money-backed guarantee; think of insurance. Use ensure to mean “make certain”—no money involved. “We can ensure that the launch will be successful.” The word assure is a promise given to another person. That person needs to follow the verb. “I assure you that we will finish soon” and “I assured Benjamin Bunny we would return to his story.”
So what is his story? What did he bring his mother? Did he bring her the heaviest carrot in Mr. McGregor’s garden? That’s certainly a possibility. Or did he bring her the heaviest diamond, one that was 200 carats? That’s a possibility too…but only if Benjamin Bunny has stock in Amazon. What do the other two words mean?
The rest of the story:
Answer: Caret is a wedge-shaped mark, the kind editors use to show an insertion of a word. Karat is a unit of fineness for gold equal to ¹/₂₄ part of pure gold in an alloy. Pure gold is considered to be 24 karats.
Many of these commonly confused words we are aware of and need only consult a good usage dictionary or reference book to verify. But what happens when we don’t even know such a word exists? I remember the first time I saw the word “ordnance.” I thought someone had made a typo and needed to insert an “i”—that is, until I learned that ordnance and ordinance are two entirely different words. Here is a sampling of other slippery homophones.
- advice – advise
- affect – effect
- bears – bares
- counsel – council – consul
- due to – do to
- kernel – colonel
- peak – pique
- principle – principal
- regimen – regiment
- site – sight – cite
- to – too – two
Ours is a tricky language, and spell check will often miss these problem words. So be sure to keep a good usage dictionary in one pocket and a good editor in the other.