It was a little embarrassing to discover recently—after multiple rereadings—that one of my favorite English novels contains clues about the language’s syntax in the late 18th–early 19th centuries.
A certain kerfuffle that’s been in the news has focused some attention on two words whose conflation has always perplexed me. It stems from a gripe I have about American English speakers.
Today’s homophone pair highlights an increasingly widespread misuse of the older word.
One of my greatest difficulties as a college professor teaching Introductory Psychology was getting many students to see that commonplace words often have a more restrictive definition in psychology, so that they would use them more precisely in their work. This has long been an issue: common words were used in psychology and given more specific meanings (e.g., “learning” and “instinct”); and psychological terms’ definitions have changed and/or expanded over time (e.g., “psychopathology”). The recent misappropriation of a psychological term for another purpose has brought these issues to mind again.