Usually, typing mistakes are easy to find (if one looks for them of course) as they make the word look unusual. There are some though that change one word into another. Sometimes, the change of the word doesn’t change the meaning of the phrase though. These are the most difficult to find typos.
I make one of these pretty often. Instead of “global warming” I type in “global warning”. The toughest one to find, but I don’t usually bother.
My co-worker and I were composing an email today. He was writing and I was watching over. When I pointed out to him that he wanted to write “vacation” instead of “vocation”, he argued that if the word was wrong, the spellchecker would have underlined it in red. Since I was 99.9% sure that I was right, I aked him to double check.
It turned out that both “vacation” and “vocation” are legitimate words. But what surprised me was that their meanings were almost opposite.
“Vacation” has to do with resting and spending the time nicely. “Vocation” has to do with hard work. If you don’t believe me, check the definitions in the dictionary. Here are the words in Dictionary.com : vacation and vocation.
P.S.: And I was right.
Yesterday, when I wrote about Maxim’s first food I of course meant his first solid food. It’s just that I didn’t know that solid food is called solid food in English. The direct translation from Russian is “solid” indeed, but when I was writing the post, I wasn’t sure that I could the word “solid” to describe food. And I was too lazy to check in the dictionary. Today, when I was replying to a comment for that post, I noticed the Google Adsense banner which was promoting some “solid food” website. I checked the site, double checked in the dictionary, and it was indeed – “solid” food.
Either I am being too smart or too stupid. I don’t know.
P.S.: Maxim seems to really enjoy his new diet.
Until now I’ve been using http://www.rambler.ru/dict for all my translation needs. I realize that it might not at all be the best out there, but it is was good enough. I wanted something fast and simple. No need for phrases, just quick word translations from Russian to English, and back.
I think I’ll be switching to http://lingvo.yandex.ru now. It is also a good enough alternative. And fast enough. It also takes care of the greatest annoyance I have with the Rambler dictionary – language switching. When asking for the translation, I think, it is pretty obvious which language the original word is in. So, if I type ‘muse’ and ask for the English/Russian translation, it is obvious that I have typed an English word and I want thus a Russian translsation. For some strange reason, with Rambler, I had to specify. But I would have minded it aswell, if not the ugly interface. Check it out. What is the problem? Well, the language switch is after the submit button. That’s inconvenient.
I’ve been coping with this for far too long. Enough!
P.S.: Yandex dictionary has another nice feature – it shows the meaning of the word in other languages too. Educational.