Public Service Announcement #2

[stormwreath]

*ahem*

The word weary means 'tired, fatigued'.

The word wary means 'cautious, alert to danger'.

They are not synonyms!

If you're wary of something, you've become suspicious of it; you suspect it might not be all that it seems and it might be dangerous.
If you're weary of something, you've become fed up with it; it's tiring you out and now you're

Comments

[jonathankorman]

My spelling is terrible, but I have zero tolerance for misspellings that result in writing the wrong word.

[stormwreath]

Weary/wary isn't just a misspelling, though: using the wrong word changes the entire meaning of the sentence and you can't always work out from context which one the writer meant.

[jonathankorman]

Aye. There needs to be a word for “misspellings” that change a word into another word.

[menomegirl]

'Catachresis' is a noun that means strained or paradoxical use of words either in error (as 'blatant' to mean 'flagrant') or deliberately (as in a mixed metaphor: 'blind mouths').

[alexeia_drae]

Pet peeve? :-)

[stormwreath]

Not at all. I just read yet another example of someone getting it wrong, and decided to light a candle instead of cursing the darkness. :-)

(My PSA #1 was about the difference between an arc and an arch, if I remember rightly...)

[erimthar]

Now if we could just scientifically break down which people genuinely don't know the difference between the two words, and which people just rely too much on their word processor's spell check to do their "proofreading" for them.

[stormwreath]

What gets me is 'wary' and 'weary' aren't even pronounced the same. (Or maybe they are in some dialects?)

[singer_shaper]

They might sound similar in the Deep South (U.S.), as "pen" and "pin" do.

[candleanfeather]

Such confusions are irritating.
But shoudn't this PSA be N°3, I seem to remember that once you explained the difference between cannon and canon?

[stormwreath]

It's possible I did. I know I've done at least one similar post before, which is why I numbered this #2, but I couldn't find it to check. (Clearly I fail at tagging.)

[curiouswombat]

Hmm - add it to my biggest bugbear and we could have a very nasty case of people being weary of loosing their virginity....

[stormwreath]

Well, if you unleash your virginity on people a lot, you'd get weary of it eventually. (Cue image of Buffy's allegedly regenerating hymen...)

[beer_good_foamy]

Oooo! There's vampirey precedent here! The Spanish-language Drácula from 1931 (shot at night on the same set as the Bela Lugosi one) is often cited as a case of how censorship was a lot more lax for non-English pictures at the time, since it supposedly has the Lucy character describe her encounter with Dracula with the phrase "The next morning I felt very weak, as if I had lost my virginity." Of course, what actually happened was that the American subtitler got virginidad mixed up with vitalidad.

And this would be the point where we point out all of Angel's references to Buffy being full of life...

[curiouswombat]

Well, if you unleash your virginity on people a lot, you'd get weary of it eventually.

My own thought exactly.

Although one might also be wary of falling over a passing unfettered virginity set loose by someone else...