Words that are not right
These words are correct but they are not right. My bones feel them to be incorrect but the dictionary disagrees.
The provocation for this post was recently seeing 'glided' and glitching out of the matrix temporarily. Why isn't it glid? I feel like I would naturally want to say glid, like when they try to get kids to conjugate fake verbs. Similar to what's happening with 'pleaded'. I feel sure I've said 'pled' before, like some sort of American.
Now, I do know. I know why it's like that. Because English is a horrifying Frankenstein's monster of a language. But it's still wronging.
Then there are the incorrect words that mean the opposite of what they sound like they ought to mean. The only way I can keep a grip on 'reactionary' is by constantly reminding myself it's actually the opposite of my instinct. Because it sounds very changeable, non?
Nor should we need to be cracking open Latin grammar books to discern that inflammable means it very much is flammable and not synonymous with non-flammable.
Want to convey something fitful, impatient, and the opposite of calm? How about 'restive'? It's even got the opposite meaning right there in the word.
Then there are contronyms. What a useful function! Why wouldn't we want a word to have two opposite meanings? Sanctions run both ways. Cleave to, cleave apart. Oversight.
Disinterested and uninterested I do understand - but rarely use if it matters because I worry the other person won't understand.
When I'm writing I'm forever searching 'what do Americans call [thing]' though the problem is I have to know or reasonably suspect it might be called something else. Very glad I thought to look up 'top shelf' or that joke wouldn't have been a joke at all.
We put up some shelves and my wife said we had to populate them. I said, "No. No that's a cursed way of saying that." She said it was correct. I said, "Yeah, for a robot."
Which is like the time I heard a guy in Canary Wharf say he had a "one-to-one" with his wife every weekend. Bro. And yes the 'Canary Wharf' part does feel very relevant.