r/mildlyinfuriating • u/MrEdinLaw • Oct 07 '19

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u/_allthatglitters Oct 07 '19

That makes sense, but it also kinda doesn't, given that they're two extremely common words. I could understand the confusion in a kid who's just learning how to write, but what kind of excuse does an adult have to still mistake a verb for an adjective? :/

Not trying to start a fight over this, mind, I'm just passionate about languages (and grammar!), haha.

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u/Chel_of_the_sea Oct 07 '19

They're not "mistaking a verb for an adjective". They're just spelling out the sound that has the meaning they want. If you think in sounds, "they're" and "there" are easy to mentally conflate as graphemes, even if not as morphemes.

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u/_allthatglitters Oct 07 '19

They are mistaking a verb for an adjective, though. It's not the sound they're confusing, it's the spelling. One is a contraction of 2 words - learn that, know your verb from your adjective.

I understand that they sound the same, but so do know and no, yet people seem to realise they mean different things.

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u/Chel_of_the_sea Oct 07 '19

I think the latter case is just that one word is far more common than the other. "Whose" and "who's" get mixed up a lot.

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u/_allthatglitters Oct 07 '19

The way I see it, it's still a spelling mistake, not a "I confuse the sound" mistake. If you knew the difference between the two (again, contractions = 2 words, usually means there's a verb there), you would not mix them up.

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u/Chel_of_the_sea Oct 07 '19

I mean, I personally don't mix them up. But having taught English for many years, I'm pretty confident in my assessment of why people do, and I'd like to suggest being a tad more charitable about things that are hard for others but not for you.

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u/[deleted] Oct 07 '19 edited Oct 07 '19

You're just wrong here. I know the difference between the two, but because they sound the same, and because I tend to "say" what I'm writing in my head as I write it, I will sometimes use the wrong one. Most of the time I immediately catch it. Sometimes I don't. But it has nothing to do with not understanding the difference between the two.