Tip of the week is drawing your attention to language, usage and other related concepts which we tend to ignore or not know the correct usage of.
Here’s the January 2015 round up
5 Jan: Did you know that the word ‘prepone’ is now an accepted word in standard English, thanks to Indians who kept using it as the opposite of postpone?
12 Jan: “Wow! This is too good!” – is an expression we hear often! ‘Too’ is used to mean something that’s more than it should be in the negative sense and not positive. For instance, “The tea is too sweet, I can’t have it”
19 Jan: “I came back late last night after the marriage got over”
Wedding and marriage are used wrongly to mean the same. Wedding is the event and marriage is the relationship that the wedding starts.
26 Jan: “My flight landed up on time”
‘Land up’ is a phrasal verb which means to get into trouble. So using land up for a flight is wrong because god forbid, the flight lands up in trouble! Flights just land!
Bonus tip for the new year: Stationary and stationery – confusing? A little tip to help you keep the confusion at bay. ‘e’ stands for envelope and the word with ‘e’ in its spelling is the one that means writing material. And stationary means not moving.