Sunday, May 21, 2006

 

misuse of 'claim'

A lot of philosophers misuse the word 'claim' of any proposition as if to claim something was just the same as to say that it was true . In fact, 'claim' means to demand or assert a right.

If you have any other examples of misused words please feel free to post them as comments.

Daniel Hill

Comments:
Hi Daniel,

It always annoys me when the tabloid press use the phrase that so-and-so "fell pregnant". For goodness sake, pregnancy is not an illness, is it? The Daily Mail is one of the worst offenders.

Best regards,

David
 
A Google search for "Pedants United" resulted in 403 hits. Methinks there be a touch of plagiarism afoot.

Dyslexical Solution: A search for "Pedants Untied" gave no hits whatsoever! So did "Pedants Untried".

But is there a GoogleWhack lurking?
 
Thanks for this, David. In fact, I wanted to call this blog `Pedant's Corner', but thought I'd get grief for not having an apostrophe in the blog name.
 
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