r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Upstairs_Cash8400 • 1d ago

English for Beginners

8.3k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

407 comments sorted by

View all comments

788

u/Swervin69 1d ago

Don’t feel bad beginners, fluent speakers still don’t know how to tell their, there, and they’re apart.

22

u/allnaturalfigjam 22h ago

Is it just me or do a lot of fluent English speakers use "weary" and "wary" interchangeably? I keep hearing people saying "be weary of that" and I'm starting to think I'm the crazy one.

I had a boyfriend in uni who pronounced "wander" the same as "wonder". Drove me up the wall.

5

u/hhfugrr3 18h ago

How often are you meeting people who others think you need to be cautious of?

6

u/allnaturalfigjam 18h ago

I live in Australia, it's less the people and more the place

9

u/hhfugrr3 18h ago

Ahh makes sense. Good luck with... well everything out there

2

u/allnaturalfigjam 18h ago

Thanks mate

3

u/Silent_Yesterday_671 9h ago

I believe you meant to say "How often are you meeting people of whom others think you need to be cautious?"

1

u/hhfugrr3 7h ago

Quite possibly, but I take the view that the word "whom" is passing into history. It's still used occasionally, but I think over the coming century it'll fall out of use. If I spoke the sentence you wrote to a fellow non-posh Brit, I reckon they'd give me a damn funny look.

3

u/sleepytoday 17h ago

I have noticed that people who pronounce wander and wonder as homophones tend to confuse the spelling, too.

3

u/blewawei 10h ago

That's why most spelling mistakes happen, generally. Historical linguists use those kinds of errors to figure out past pronunciations from before we could record voices.

1

u/Grantrello 9h ago

Yeah it's something that has apparently caught on recently because I see it written a lot too. People will write weary when they mean wary.