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Assume v. Presume

gomezz said:
Thursday afternoon, Inside Science on Radio 4: Discussing aerosols but saying (repeatedly) saying arseholes. :rolleyes:
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Was that the same programme where a (presumably) German speaker kept pronouncing "wane" (as "in the immunity to Coronavirus is on the wain") as "vein" (and thus confused me for a while)?
 
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Black Hole said:
German speaker kept pronouncing "wain" [...] as "vein"
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Not just Germans. One of the GPs at the surgery is Tamil. He pronounces the W in his surname as a V, everyone else pronounced it as W. I never knew who to ask for!
Johnny Foreigner is always mixing up f, v and w sounds. Then there’s the French - zzz instead of th. You have to be on your guard when listening to people whose first language isn’t English. (I’ll include the Americans in that definition ;) )
 
I wasn’t very observant. I missed the wane/wain confusion. Never mind, the point was about the sound of the word not the spelling. :)
 
I'm getting a bit fed up with people using "that" as a synonym for "which" (in formal contexts; informally, who cares?).
 
bottletop said:
I wonder if it's related to this recent change? (This is just a guess.)

Manage the link-sharing security update for files - Google Workspace Admin Help

To make file sharing more secure, URLs for some files and folders in Google Drive include a resource key by default. This security measure, which appears in a file’s URL, helps protect your file from
support.google.com
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Someone at big G seems to have made a mistake here. They've used "affected" twice (shock, horror) and "impacted" 14 times.
Do people think "impacted" sounds clever, when clearly the correct word is "affected"?
 
Anyone notice "assure" has dropped out and we are now all being "reassured" despite not having been assured in the first place?
 
Hasn’t that always been the case? Perhaps the original assurance is implied in some original comment or statement. Although how this works if someone asks Martin Lewis if their payments to a bust gas company are safe, I’m not sure. He replied they are. The questioner is reassured. Were they ever assured? :confused:
 
Whenever I hear the term iterate I think of those days spent waiting for a numerical simulation to complete x thousand iterations. Yawn! Reiterate - redo the simulation because I made an error, some wag pulled the plug out of the computer or there was a power cut.
 
gomezz said:
I wince whenever someone says reiterate instead of iterate.
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Like @EEPhil I always associate iterate with math/computing, so just did a quick Google to check my understanding. I stumbled on this Merriam-Webster quote:
"Iterate and reiterate are synonymous meaning "to repeat or do over again." Both words have Latin origins so this is not a case of over-correction in English." So the Romans started it.

(Yes, M-W is American but as they refer back to Latin roots it still applies.)
The full article is here: Why 'Iterate' and 'Reiterate' Mean the Same Thing
 
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