Monday, March 28, 2011

Top 5 Misspelled WoW words

Since I'm not an english native speaker, there are plenty of words that I misspell on a regular basis. Love always proofreads my texts and makes smirky comments when I've missed an "o" in a "too" or I've written quite instead of quiet (Ok, maybe I've never done that but I have a guildie who does that all the time). Speaking of guildies, I've got a guildie (although he left recently) who insisted on always writing rooster instead of roster when we were talking about how to fill our ranks. Those threads quickly filled up with pictures of roosters and questionmarks. Poor guy. The english language is quite unforgiving. Don't get me wrong, I love it and use it alot in my everyday life. But being the mish-mash language that it is, and being prone to undergo a prescriptive point of view in its development, english is very far from logical. Phonetically you could write "chef" just as well as "sheagh". The linguistic meltingpot that is WoW, with people from all over the world who have their own frame work on how to use a language which they apply to english, will sometimes produce hilarious talk. Here's a list of some commonly misspelled words in WoW and why (probably) people keep spelling them wrong.

5. Orgrimmar - Ogrimmar
A common linguistical mistake is to omit letters that aren't distinctly pronounced. One good example is surprise - suprise (a mistake I do often actually). Just as with surprise, the first R of Orgrimmar is quite silent, and I can also imagine people thinking "hmm, I've already put one R there, should there really be another one?". The common abbreviation OG probably adds to the confusion. Some people feel that the abbreviation is wrong too, because it is treating Orgrimmar like a two word name, like TB , UC and SW, when Orgrimmar really is a one word name like Darnassus and Exodar. It should be considered a two-word name since it stems from Orgrim Doomhammer and so really it is Orgrim-mar. Then the abbreviation correctly should be OM. But since orcish isn't a language that anyone actually speaks (or is there?), people should grammatically treat Orgrimmar as a one-word name. I don't know how you abbreviate Darnassus and Exodar though? Darn? Darnass? *chuckle* Exo? So then Orgrimmar should be abbreviated OR or Org (which some do).

4. Enhancement - Enchancement
It's about equally common for people to add letters that shouldn't really be there as it is for them to remove letters that should. One example is the enhancement - enchancement misspelling, another one is Wraith of the Lich King instead of "Wrath". The enchancement problem probably also stems from the fact that there is something called enchanting, and these words look enough alike for people to have unconsciously combined the spelling of them in their minds, producing non-existant words like enchancement. Some people take it even further and call it enchantment shaman. I love people who simply need an enchantment shaman for their raid. Worst of all, I know people who actually say enchancement. *shudder*

3. Efflorescence - Effloressence
This mistake is extremely common all over resto druid blogs. It's a simple mistake, because people think it's a combination of the (non-existant) word "efflor" (maybe some think it's a latinized version of the word "flower") and "essence". It's really just a version of the word Florescence, with the prefix Ef- in front which is used to mark that the word is active. "Ef" is really a version of "ex", only that in front of the letter F it turns into Ef instead and means;

'a prefix meaning “out of,” “from,” and hence “utterly,” “thoroughly,”'

Another common example of this mistake is Maelstrom - Maelstorm. A strom (a word that doesn't exist on its own) and a storm aren't the same thing. The strom in maelstrom comes from the word stream and has little to do with storms.

2. Rogue - Rouge
A simple misplacement of a letter, and suddenly you've changed the entire meaning of a word. Ever since I took my first steps in WoW, this misspelling has haunted me. Yet again it is easy to see why - In most cases, it's ok to misplace some letters, add some letters or overall not get a word completely right because everyone will understand what you mean anyway. That is why words like Effloressence and Enchancement exist and prevail (if no one ever understood what these people said they'd probably go away). Just as with rouge, most people who read the misspelling will correct it in their minds, and maybe never even notice the misspelling took place in the first place. But rouge is still worse than effloressence/enchancement exactly because it actually changes the meaning of the word. It's hilarious to read people write

"looking for rouge to pvp".

Make-up as a new, cunning tactic in pvp?

1. Scribe - Inscriber/Inscriptionist
The list of terms used to call for a scribe can me made very long. Everything from glyph maker to inscriptionator has probably been used by now. The most common misspellings are Inscriber and Inscriptionist, but they are wrong for two different reasons. Inscriber is not so much a misspelling as it is a misusage of a word. The word inscriber actually exists, and it's quite related to scribe. In most cases people probably wouldn't think twice if you used Inscriber where there should be scribe. But if we want to be lore-nerdy (yes we do!), using inscriber for scribes is wrong in WoW. As Wowpedia explains it;

"In World of Warcraft, one who takes on the Inscription profession is not intrinsically an inscriber; such a person is properly referred to as a "scribe." Specifically, an inscriber is a variant of the broad "arcanist" core class, as is the mage, the necromancer, and the warlock. While scribes employ a degree of knowledge concerning rune magic (as evident by their creation of glyphs), they are not themselves versed in the secrets of rune-casting and rune-channeling in the unique way that inscribers are. "

Inscriptionist or Inscriptioner on the other hand don't exist, but is simply a solution some people have taken to how they should inflect the profession name "Inscription" so that it fits the person who does it. It works for many other professions like Alchemy - Alchemist and Herbalism - Herbalist. Other professions like Engineer hint that it should be turned into Inscriptioner. But really, it's scribe. I would accept inscriptionator.

2 comments:

  1. for #5, I like inscriptionator, but don;t see it much :P

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  2. I also like Inscriptionator, because it makes me think of a superhero!! Also, I'm intrigued by Org being referred to as OG (as you may surmise, I have always seen it referred to as Org). Similarly, I see Darnassus referred to as Darn, or in the case of one delightful friend, Darnassafrass. Also, I wanted to suggest that Efflorescence also comes from the word effervescence, which I had to rewrite a few times before firefox stopped correcting my spelling :)

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