Rarely Confused Words, Sort Of…
| Usually Intended | Often Mistaken | |
| Disdain – To hold in contempt | Distain – To stain or tarnish | |
| Distain is so rarely appropriate these days that it’s almost certainly a mistake, unless you’re still living in the Eighteenth Century, but most so-called ‘spelling checkers’ allow it. | ||
| Whose – The possessive of ‘Who’ | Who’s – A contraction for ‘Who is’ | |
| There are exactly zero possessives of the common pronouns formed with apostrophe ‘S’ in English, but most so-called ‘spelling checkers’ either allow or encourage the confusion. | ||
| Compliment | Complement | |
| When one says something nice about another person one ‘compliments’ them. | ||
| When things go well together they complement (or complete) each other. | ||
| We have a full complement of baseball players. | ||
| Our latest acquisition, the Biltmore in New York, complements our chain of hotel properties. | ||
| The easiest way to distinguish the two is usually one of agency. | ||
Feel free to add your own pet peeves…