Do you wait with fishy breath or abated breath? Read more to find out which and why it is correct. Did you know you were quoting or misquoting Shakespeare?
on Just Publishing Advice:
According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, the spelling baited breath instead of bated breath is a common mistake.
It also says that nearly a third of citations for this idiom in the Oxford English Corpus use the incorrect choice of spelling.
The confusion about the correct form of this idiom is because the word bated is not in use today.
The only time you will see the word is in the expression, bated breath.
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Fascinating
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Glad you liked it, JYP. I thought it was cleverly done and entertaining also.
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Good to draw attention to this
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I thought it was a fun treatment of something most of us probably do not think about. Thanks for commenting, Derrick.
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Thanks, Derrick.
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Now that people are using voice more than the written word to communicate, I worry that we’ll see even more confusion about homonyms. When you can’t see a word, you can’t be sure how it’s spelled (and you may not care).
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If you hear it and not read it, why would you care how it is spelt? If you were to write it down later or read it later, then you would need to worry.
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Why? Because you might be hearing “hoard”, for example, when the person said “horde”, so you’d hear the wrong message. If you can see the word, you have a better chance at knowing what’s going on.
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Point taken. Most people probably are not too/to/two concerned about what they hear. And likely could not tell the difference anyways.
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When I get the spelling wrong,
I always say it was on porpoise….
For, when I get the spelling right,
It doesn’t serve the purpose.
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I’d have gotten a haddock and gotten crabby if you had been shellfish enough to belabor this more eel. 😉
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Super article
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Glad you like it.
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