Between 'ingenious' and 'ingenuous', 'famous' and 'infamous', 'terrible' and 'terrific'
The barrage of confusion and misconception in many English words...
Some words in English are often used wrongly because of their morphological properties that give us a bogus sense that they can mean what we ordinarily know, or because their morphological properties are similar to other words’. Perhaps, it might be our traditional knowledge of word formation that predisposes us to using them that way.
A couple of days ago, I was chatting with a senior friend who lamented how terrific his journey had been because he got home some minutes past 12am.
“The journey was terrific,” he wrote. “I should’ve stayed over.”
He meant terrible from every demonstration of it; but terrific, I must say, does not share the same abode with terrible.
terrific means of great size, amount, or intensity; as in this book has had a terrific influence on me, that’s a terrific idea, the car is going at terrific speed, or your test scores were terrific.
SYN: very great or tremendous
We might also believe that ‘big’ and ‘bogus’ mean the same because they have the same morphological property hence a non-native English speaker who’s seen the word bogus before but never bothers himself checking what it means because he believes it is same as ‘big’ or ‘large’ might say something like ‘oh wow what a bogus gown she’s wearing. Big and bogus are not the same, even though they hell look like they are.
Bogus means fake or not genuine; as in she beamed a bogus smile just to make the man feel good about himself, or he was arrested at the airport because he was found carrying a bogus passport.
In class one day, I have once asked my students what they think conscientious means and somehow I was expecting them to say something like ‘full of conscience’ or ‘moral’, but they didn’t. They knew that the English language is riddled with some madness. I should say, at this juncture, that there is no conscience in conscientious.
To be conscientious means to be diligent or industrious; as in as a conscientious teacher, I take my work very seriously.
It is also important to note that prodigal and prodigious do not belong to the same category of meaning.
While prodigal means being extravagant or wasteful, prodigious means remarkably or impressively great in size or degree. For example, the man was crushed under the prodigious weight of the lorry, this stove consumes a prodigious amount of kerosene.
SYN: enormous, huge, colossal
Invaluable does not give us the opposite of valuable. It means extremely useful or indispensable, a higher degree of ‘valuable’; as in my English blog is fast becoming an invaluable source of information to learners of English. One of the synonyms of invaluable is priceless, which means highly valuable, and not the otherwise.
In the same vein, inflammable, which means easily set on fire (as in inflammable materials), exists in the same degree as flammable. They mean the same thing.
Ingenious and ingenuous are two other words that are likely to be confused. Ingenious means (of a person) clever, original, and inventive; as in he was ingenious enough to overcome the limited budget. While ingenuous means (of a person or action) innocent and unsuspecting; naive, childlike, and trusting. For example, the ingenuous young girl followed the grown-up man to his apartment after a heavy rain. It might not be what you are thinking though. Lol.
To avoid this confusion, as I have always told my students, is to think of ingenious as having some ‘genius’ in it—ius, ious. You gerrit?
I once asked a young boy what phlegmatic meant, and taking a cue from phlegm which means mucus, he said, after some careful thought, that it meant something…like someone having the ability to change or flexible. Lol.
A phlegmatic person is actually someone who is calm, cool, and collected; not easily worried or excited.
Impressionable is another word that is likely to be confused with being impressed by something or someone. But it isn’t.
Impressionable means easily influenced; susceptible, credulous or naive. For example, children are highly impressionable and as parents we must be careful of the content we exposed them to on TV and social media.
Before I leave you, I must also consider another word: infamous. Infamous is a word that is often believed to mean the opposite of famous, but this is untrue.
Infamous actually means famous for being bad; notorious, ill-famed.
Do have a terrific day, dear readers!
Yours in English,
Francis