The increase in reliance on electronic media has resulted in rampant proliferation of homophonous (soundalike) misuses of the English language. When people only hear phrases over the phone, on television and radio and in conversation, rather than reading the phrases in (well edited) books or magazines, the phrases can get corrupted. The corruptions wend their way into electronic text, only to be read and perpetuated. Sandy Reed of Infoworld has coined the term Technopropism to identify those misuses which spellcheckers cannot catch because they are real words, just incorrectly used. I've been collecting examples of bastardized cliches and other misuses for some time. I sent Sandy some of my collected examples and she included a few of them in a subsequent column. Some of these garbled perversions (there, that should result in some web search engine hits for this page :-) almost make sense but they're all incorrect. Here is a quiz to test your knowledge of proper usage and phrasing. If you have other examples which you have seen in electronic media (email, Usenet, the web), feel free to mail them to me for possible inclusion in a later quiz. I'd also be happy to receive any and all corrections and comments.
Are you ready? Let's take the quiz. There are over 100 questions, but you should be able to whip right through them. For each question, select the correct phrasing by clicking the accompanying radio button. Currently there is no penalty for guessing. Note that some phrases are American English colloquialisms which may not be familiar to all.
Quiz Contents Copyright © 1997 Wade S. Blomgren - All Rights Reserved Quiz contents last updated Wed Mar 5 10:12:05 PST 1997
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