Many people think they know their main language intimately, but there are many words and phrases in English that people often use wrongly. Whether these erroneous uses truly count as “wrong” is up for debate—after all, a mistake that has become widely adopted should really be considered acceptable. But whichever side of this argument you err towards, here are five examples of ones that we are all making.
English is a language rich with imagery, meaning, and metaphor, and when we want to express ourselves we can draw upon a canon replete with beautifully turned phrases, drawing from the language’s Latin, French, and Germanic roots—not to mention those apt aphorisms that English has appropriated from other languages.
In 1582, Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of the Merchant Tailors’ school, wrote that “our English tung is of small reatch, it stretcheth no further than this Iland of ours.” It didn’t stay that way. Today, English is spoken by more than a billion people all over the world.
One way of predicting the future is to look back at the past. The global role English plays today as a lingua franca—used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages—has parallels in the Latin of pre-modern Europe.
