I recently commented on a blog post, Celebrating Courage, Creativity and Grit by Silkannthreades. I wrote that it was a paeon to some talented bloggers. Thanks to Grammarly, I realized that paeon may have been mispelled. (Of course I realized this as soon as I hit send.) I had to reply to my own comment and acknowledge that paeon was a typo and the real word was paean. (I can’t type but at least I have a decent vocabulary.)
According to the dictionary:
A paean (pronounced PEE-in, sometimes spelled pean) is a fervent expression of joy or praise, often in song.
A paeon (pronounced PEE-in or PEE-on) is a four-syllable metrical foot in prosody. Anyone who doesn’t analyze poetry will never have use for the word.
A peon (pronounced PEE-on) is an unskilled laborer or menial worker. Today, use of the word is most common in Indian English, where it’s used to describe any worker and presumably doesn’t have negative connotations. In American and British English, peon has an insulting tone. No one, in the U.S. at least, wants to be a peon.
The first two words have origins in the same Greek term; peon comes from the Medieval Latin term for foot soldier.
You DO have a good vocabulary! (I wouldn’t have noticed the typo.)
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Thanks. I probably owe more to Grammarly than my own ability to detect typos.
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And peony is a flower. English is weird.
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Clever addition. I had not even thought of that. Thanks! (Yes, English is weird.)
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I am a mere peon who uses the paeon in my paean of the day! 🙄
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LOL Good vocabulary example.
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Interesting 😉
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Thanks for reading and commenting.
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Fun to learn this but I don’t know if it’s going to “stick”. I mean, it’s a lot of P-ing. hee hee (runs away)
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You’re in trouble then.
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Well, you’ve just taught me something – I would definitely have gone with paeon to mean praise.
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Thanks.
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