Everybody has a word that defeats them. For many English-speakers it’s the word “separate” that people stubbornly spell “seperate.” For me, such a word is the Spanish “elegir” (to choose) that I keep spelling as “eligir.” Of course, I know that its’ el-E-ction and not el-I-ction but that’s not helping. I have to dig out a couple of “eligir” from every test I create for students.
3 responses to “A Stubborn Word”
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For me in Spanish it’s asesinar, that e just looks so wrong, asasinar seems so much more international…. and I also want to say eligir, it just looks so much more elegant.
in English separate and devastate are ones I always have to think about, as well things like changeable and some -able -ible words.
In Polish I sometimes want to use -ęka where it should be- enka (they’re pronounced the same) so I’ll write things like łazięka ubstead of łazienka (bathroom).
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In Russian I always get in trouble with the negative “ne” and “ni.” But that’s a problem every Russian-speaker has except for maybe 3 or 4 super educated people on all the planet.
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I read a vocabulary book in middle school which had an example of separate as ‘se (latin root meaning aside, apart) + par’. Basically breaking par. I’ve never misspelled it since.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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