Skip to main content

language evolution - How common is the confusion between "affect" and "effect"?


I stumbled onto a US Congress representative’s website with what I think is a blatant and very visible mistake:


John D. Dingell website


Namely, the sentence in yellow, “How does the population change effect our district”. I am surprised to see this error in such a high-profile and (probably) thoroughly checked webpage. So, I wonder: how common is this exact error (effect vs. affect)? Have the usage of the two really started to merge, so that we should consider them as equivalent?


PS: yes, I know the dictionary says they have different meaning; I'm asking about usage and the evolution of the language.



Answer



The [mis]usage is quite common, but the two have not started to merge and should not be considered equivalent. Most lists of common vocabulary mistakes list affect vs. effect among the most frequently encountered.


Don't assume that what you see on a U.S. Representative's web page is grammatically correct or even good English. Even well-intentioned, literate people make what I call "spell-check" errors. That is, a spell-checker will validate both effect and affect and even grammar checkers may not flag their misuse since they can both appear as nouns or as transitive verbs. (It didn't get flagged by the computer? Get it on the web page!)


Proofreading is something almost no one does by hand (or eye) anymore. Too bad.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more