Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Hello,
I’ve found the words “exacerbate” and “exasperate” to often be confused.
A recent and sad case of this was the announcement of an elderly loved one’s parting; my sister-in-law wrote that age and attrition, “exasperated” by senile dementia, ultimately had its effect.
I didn’t say anything; it would have been inappropriate, everyone knew what she meant – and many probably thought that was the correct word.
Last edited by Eguana (2015-06-15 05:25:52)
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Welcome, Eguana!
“Exasperate/exacerbate” has already been discussed here.
I’ve mentioned this recently, but it bears fairly frequent repetition as new people join the group:
There are many eggcorns that have been discussed here but never made it onto our official eggcorn list, presumably because those few who are authorized to add new ones to the list rarely find time to do so. So, when considering posting an eggcorn here, it’s not enough just to see if it’s on the list; one must go to the second search field (the one marked “Google Searchâ€) in the right-hand column on the Eggcorn Database page and search there for the word or phrase in question. Then, if you find that it’s already been discussed here, you get to decide whether you’d like to add a comment to the existing discussion.
To the powers that be: Can’t we prominently display a post explaining this sort of thing where newbies will see it? It’d make things easier for them, and improve the quality of discussion here. It’d also be good to mention resources such as the Ngram viewer, etc.
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