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The expansion of an acronym like PIN or HIV may be well known to English speakers, but the acronyms themselves have come to be treated as words, so little thought is given to what their expansion is (and "PIN" is also pronounced the same as the word "pin"; disambiguation is probably the source of "PIN number"; "SIN number" for "Social Insurance ...
See List of English words with disputed usage for words that are used in ways that are deprecated by some usage writers but are condoned by some dictionaries. There may be regional variations in grammar , orthography , and word-use , especially between different English-speaking countries.
A aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the ...
The term was seen in English in the early 16th century. [4] It is generally thought to be an onomatopoeia imitative of speech, similar to the words jabber (to talk rapidly) and gibber (to speak inarticulately). [5] [6] It may originate from the word jib, which is the Angloromani variant of the Romani language word meaning
A disfluence or nonfluence is a non-pathological hesitance when speaking, the use of fillers (“like” or “uh”), or the repetition of a word or phrase. This needs to be distinguished from a fluency disorder like stuttering with an interruption of fluency of speech, accompanied by "excessive tension, speaking avoidance, struggle behaviors, and secondary mannerism".
Therapy speak can be associated with controlling behavior. [3] [9] It can be used as a weapon to shame people or to pathologize them by declaring the other person's behavior (e.g., accidentally hurting the other person's feelings) to be a mental illness, [3] [10] as well as a way to excuse or minimize the speaker's choices, for example, by blaming a conscious behavior like ghosting on their ...
In literary criticism and rhetoric, a tautology is a statement that repeats an idea using near-synonymous morphemes, words or phrases, effectively "saying the same thing twice". [1] [2] Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature. [3] Like pleonasm, tautology is often considered a fault of style when unintentional.
A spoonerism is an occurrence of speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched (see metathesis) between two words of a phrase. [1] [a] These are named after the Oxford don and priest William Archibald Spooner, who reportedly commonly spoke in this way. [2]