1. practice/practise (I know practise is the verb, but I want it to have a mnemonic on principle)
2. allemand/allemagne (one of them capitalizes but I forget which, so that should be included in the mnemonic)
3. continual/continuous (I have to look it up every. single. fucking. time.)
4 comments:
Is practice/practise Canadian, or have I been misspelling a word my entire life?
"continual/continuous (I have to look it up every. single. fucking. time.)"
I have to look up how to spell accommodate and commitment. When I worked in theatre admin, I had a note on my bulletin board reading
ACCOMMODATE YOUR COMMITMENT
because I couldn't learn it.
Here I am 25 years later, still haven't learned.
The first Google result tells me that practise is Commonwealth, so it looks like you've only been misspelling it the past few years :) It's not something I ever thought about until I started translating professionally and my revisers would correct me on it. There's enough penetration of US spelling that in general people don't notice practice as a verb, and if they see practise as a noun they assume you're hypercorrecting to British even though that isn't the British usage.
Accommodate and commitment are what spell check and autocorrect are for. (Especially when you have commitment and committee happening near each other!) And embarrass. I don't even know if I know them or not, because if I type them wrong the computer corrects them.
Also, I should add for the record that Poodle pointed out that c'était en Allemagne que M. Kennedy a dit qu'il était un beigne. (And while that sentence was technically uttered en allemand, in general il parlait anglais so that solves that problem.)
And the capitalization isn't word-specific either. Il est Allemand, il habite en Allemagne et il parle allemand, just like je suis Canadienne, j'habite au Canada et je parle anglais.
(This post has been deleted and reposted because I made typos that affected meaning)
Practice - noun
Practise - verb
It's alphabetical! How's that?
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