Do you know people who use words and don’t know the meaning of them?! *lighthearted*

[PoshestPaws]

I have a friend and work colleague who do this all the time and I would love to point it out and correct them or ask if they know what the words mean.
It would feel rude and patronising to mention it, especially when I’m not perfect and make my own mistakes!

I sometimes pretend I don’t understand (and sometimes I genuinely don’t) when it’s just a sentence of random words that don’t make sense.

I wondered if anyone else knows someone who acts in such a billowing way and if you feel pensive towards them when they are being perpendicular? Do you take a collateral response or just decide it’s not worth being kinetic over it?

I did overhear my colleague once saying she reads a lot which has increased her vocabulary, I wonder if I should buy her a dictionary and thesaurus for Christmas? 😂

An example from earlier today that inspired this thread was my friend saying “I feel a bit convoluted about seeing Ben tonight, I’m not sure if I want to go out or not”
I just replied “that’s understandable” it really isn’t though!

Penultimate! I realised relatively recently that there are a large number of people who use it to mean “better than ultimate”!

I’ve seen the fazed/phased confusion on here a lot over the last few days. More a homophone mix-up than a ‘mistake’ I suppose?

My DM says abortion when she means abomination 🤦🏻‍♀️

People generally use fazed correctly but spell it wrong they think both meanings of the word are spelled the same.

My late gran used to call her DustBuster her Dambuster.

I think 'disinterested' has been used incorrectly so much that the meaning has actually changed.

I had a friend at uni who had his own made up word he would regularly use in - “abbundly” (no idea how it’s spelled given it doesn’t exist) - from the context he used it in I think he meant “apparently”.

I went a bit nuts in the cantine at work in Denmark. My colleague kept talking about how they were going to sail in canoes. I pointed out that if she was sailing then it wasn't a canoe she was in. She looked at me blankly and said well what else do you do in a canoe? Another colleague said well you paddle or row. Said colleague is a fake scout (fdf) and I am a Girl Guide (fairly big rivalry between the different guides, scouts and fdfer). I said even an fdfer knows! You ought to be ashamed! And then flounced back to my office.😁

On the phone with a good friend. A very intelligent person, she occasionally talked out of her hat. She’d been on a city tour and was talking about the architecture of a particular building, and commented that the “faKade” was remarkable, blah blah blah … she said with such confidence, I was reluctant though amused to murmur, “it’s pronounced façade - it’s a French word”. She thanked me and said she was relieved she’d said it to me any not anyone else

I’m not perfect by any stretch - I once pronounced misled “mizzled”. My 9 year old self was reciting a word list to my class teacher 🤣

The best one was at work with a woman I only referred to as Minge. She loathed me, I didn’t care. Minge came in one Monday and asked our colleague if she’d tasted kweenoah as it was delicious. I don’t know how I suppressed the snort. I prayed that she asked one of her bosses the same question as I know one of them would have grinned while correcting her as she was a fucking know it all. Still makes me smile 😊

Yes I don’t think many people realise what the actual meaning is and use it to mean they have no interest

” I wondered if anyone else knows someone who acts in such a billowing way and if you feel pensive towards them when they are being perpendicular? Do you take a collateral response or just decide it’s not worth being kinetic over it?”

Is this how you speak? Becuase I find it very odd.

or is this an example of how your friend speaks?

I sometimes use words I don’t understand to sound more photosynthesis

In fairness, Merriam Webster gives both definitions now. I think both ‘not interested’ and ‘unbiased’ are generally considered correct these days.

😂. I thought op was a bit pretentious knoblike

I had a wonderful boss who did this all the time. He used to confuse “nefarious “ and “nebulous” and “ingenious “ and “disingenuous “. I got some brilliant definition mugs made for his birthday.

A friend once told me that they loved my self-defecating sense of humour.

I received a written invitation to a ceilidh.

Happily told my friend I was going to a clyde.
She told me it was pronounced KAY-lee.
Embarrassed even now, many years on.

Gotta love a good malapropism.

That’s a legitimate use of the word; it’s listed as one of the meanings in the dictionary.
”Have you seen the new building in the high street; it’s a complete abortion.”
My grandmother used to use it quite often as an expression.

Years ago, my workmate was nice enough, but a know-it-all. She was ALWAYS right. She was also a Mrs. Malaprop and if anyone told her she'd used a wrong word, she would get mad and insist she was right. One day she asked me to read through the script of a talk she was giving and instead of using the word efficiently, she had written effluently. I did try to tell her but she wasn't having any of it.

No-one in particular but you see it a lot on here - 'can you get some resbite care'.

My dad can’t get that it’s vagaries not vagrancies. He says it every couple of weeks, I’ve given up.

I had to go to court as a witness and the defendant ( who was charged with abh, breaking an injunction and threatening behaviour) decided to do his own defence. Which would have been funny had he not been able to question me whilst I was in the witness box. He had clearly watched LA LAW as he constantly threw in random words like conjecture , affidavit, indictment and litigation. The judge had to ask him several times what he meant .

There was an urban legend (maybe!) at my Uni that a lecturer had quit in embarrassment when he realised that the word 'hirsute' did not mean 'therefore'...

🧔‍♂️

Yes that’s true, although I thought uninterested was correct. But if someone says disinterested I know what they mean and obviously don’t say anything. It probably doesn’t even resister