Near Synonyms and Commonly Confused Words
Two very different problems get filed under the same heading. One is spelling-driven: accept and except sound almost identical, so people reach for the wrong one. The other has nothing to do with spelling: concise and cursory look nothing alike, but both mean short, and choosing between them requires knowing why the writing was short. […]
Prefixes That Show Direction, Negation, and Degree
A prefix is the fastest clue in the language. Before you know anything else about a word, its first two or three letters may tell you that something is being denied, reversed, repeated, or overdone. The clue is real but partial, and treating it as a full definition is the single most common way people […]
