Talk about the kettle calling the black pot, sheesh.

I can't believe I missed this thread before! Sweet bump. FWIW imo, "insure" and "ensure" are generally interchangeable in a non-insurance context unless you work for the AP.

In other news, last year I received a vendor's form contract that said the contract would "insure" to the benefit of the parties' successors and assigns. I corrected it to "inure" in my markup. Standard legal boilerplate. When I received the next draft of the contract, I noticed that the vendor's lawyer had changed it back to "insure". It felt like someone was smearing feces on my brain.

Generally insure is used for finances, ensure is used for everything else.

This is not necessarily incorrect, but it looks weird: "Priming the espresso machine before use insures efficient operation."

I don't think so

http://www.bartleby.com/68/42/3342.html

And the OED concurs, to my surprise. I guess I was being overly nitty about this. As it turns out, "ensure," "insure," and "assure," as well as "insurance," "ensurance," and "assurance," have all been used interchangeably, although it's most common now in the US to distinguish between them.

I scanned your post for apparent errors without your sanction!


Happy to report there are no such words like that. imo.

Did you find any? If not, you might want to peruse it.

Ummm, this is a whole lot of words for saying nothing.

In your first example you tried to suggest that even though they ate different sandwiches they still had the same lunch. Then someone disagreed so you wrote the post I quoted.

All you had to say was that if you're just talking about the place where the food came from, they had the same lunch. However, if you're talking about specific items from the same food place, they didn't have the same lunch.

The only reason I'm bringing this up is because it struck me as incredibly weird for so much writing to be done on such a simple concept. (especially because you're obv very smart.)

Maybe I missed some posts leading up to this exchange.


EDIT: Didn't see you mention the context at the start of your post. But you never mentioned context in your first post on this subject and that's what caused the confusion in the first place!

Oh, one more I just noticed from PJ's post quoted above:

It's "different from," not "different than."


Cue a bunch of people saying "different than" is accepted usage now.

I didn't think I had to. I had assumed it was obvious. But when people kept misunderstanding it, I spelled it out.

I saw that yesterday! I'm a Freshman Composition instructor, and I would like to bring that painful example to my students. Do you happen to have a picture of the billboard? I saw it from a moving train, and couldn't take one.
Thanks in advance!

Bumped for ******ed conversation overheard at work:

Guy: "I knew someone who smoked two and a half packs day."
Girl: "Are you serious? That's gross. Even if you only smoked one pack a day, you'd literally have to be lighting your next cigarette as you're putting your other one out."

And you'd literally be out of cigarettes in an hour.

Her use of literally can be correct here, even if she's a poor estimator of how long cigs last.

Lol, I came here to post about the overuse of adverbs! "I feel/felt bad about that." It's 'bad', not 'badly' you ****ing *******s. You aren't trying to convey that your sense of touch doesn't work right. It also half tilts me when I ask someone "How are you?" and they reply with "Well." This only works because well is also an adjective. If it were only an adverb then you would have to say "I am doing well." for it to be correct.

I don't get it. Assuming someone is actually smoking a cigarette, no matter how casually, it's not burning for more than 15 minutes TOPS (and that's a very liberal allowance).

I've discussed this with a few people and I'm still not sure what's correct. I think it comes down to what you think the person is looking for when they ask the question.

When I hear "How are you?" I think "how are you [doing]?" is the question, so I think an adverb is correct if I'm giving a one-word response.

It seems to me that if I were answering with good then I'm interpreting their question as "what are you like?" and I'm telling them that I'm a good person. Other than the awkwardness of telling people you're a good person, I don't think my parents or close friends would ask me what I'm like every time I talk to them.

If I'm incorrect I blame having studied Spanish. It's a lot easier in Spanish because they have two verbs for to be and it's obvious both what the person is asking for and whether an adverb or adjective is correct in response.

Hm, that's an interesting way to look at the question. I always have thought of it as "What is your current mental/physical/emotional state?" Happy, sad, fine, good, cold, miserable, etc make sense. I've never heard anyone say coldly, happily, sadly, etc.

That makes sense.

I guess the "What is your current state?" interpretation never occurred to me for some reason. Part of this is probably that, even given that, in Spanish the response would still be well and so forth. I'm not a native Spanish speaker and since I haven't used it for a long time I could barely get by with it, but since I took a lot of classes that touched on it, and one that was strictly a Spanish-grammar class, it has a lot of impact since I've only learned English grammar directly through high school and that's a joke.

So I guess good or well is fine, depending on how you interpret the question. I've always felt like saying good is about as valid as saying "I'm 5'11'', overweight and have ADD." if someone asks me how I am but your explanation has convinced me.

Also, I'm not sure why but good for some reason has irked me a lot more than any other adjective. For example, finely would actually sound very weird to me and I'm sure I've said fine plenty of times though my default is well. Same goes for your examples. I think part of it is that "I've been doing finely [coldly, happily, sadly]". Miserably is the only one that would be used with doing, but I will admit that it too would be a weird one-word response to "how are you?".

Thinking about it in this way, I think I must concede. When I was writing that last paragraph it occurred to me that if I was talking to a friend I hadn't seen for a while I would say something like "We've been happy" which obviously makes it a valid response to the question "How have you been?" as well as the same question in the present tense.

I'll still stick with saying well since it's a habit and it at least could be correct depending on interpretation. I'll also continue to cringe when my mom tells me to drive safe.

Quite honestly, I couldn't tell you how many cigs are in a pack. If the woman in question overestimates the burn duration of cigs @ 30 min and presumes that there are 30 cigs in a pack, she could quite correctly say something like "Geez, wouldn't you have to be literally lighting up the next cigarette before the last one is out in order to smoke a pack a day?" She'd be wrong, but her grammar and word usage would be correct.

Yeah, that completely makes sense wrt Spanish. That's very helpful to me. I don't think I'll tilt anymore at hearing "Well.".

Even if she followed the statement by saying, "And I smoked for eight years."?

I'd still knock her for being regular-old ******ed rather than abusing language.

Earlier today, my boss asked us to send him some customer antidotes for the sales team to use.

My girlfriend works for an agency that helps special needs children and kids with behavior disorders, like autistic kids, etc. I was talking to one of her co-workers one night and told him I admired his commitment and found his job very altruistic. He goes, "Yeah, we work with some altruistic kids, some with Asperger's..."