tribalbeeyatch

from m-w.com:

insure: 2. to make certain especially by taking necessary measures and precautions

ensure: to make sure, certain or safe

And they are listed as synonyms.

"ENSURE, INSURE, ASSURE, SECURE mean to make a thing or person sure. ENSURE, INSURE, and ASSURE are interchangeable in many contexts where they indicate the making certain or inevitable of an outcome, but INSURE sometimes stresses the taking of necessary measures beforehand[...]"

cheetah

hmmm, that's interesting. the necessary beforehand measures are key to what I have been thinking though.

Anyway, in the case I was referring to, it was not so much that the words are very similar, which they are, but he just wouldn't allow it to be spelled with an 'e' EVER! They had to be globally changed to 'i'!! As if the ensure word just didn't really exist!

cheetah

Oh, I decided to post how I handled it, just in case someone wants to know! I wrote back and told him that I was familiar with the information he provided, but in writing the report, I was interested to learn, when I looked it up, that comprise is actually a synonym for include and therefore to say a group includes/comprises 20 members is technically correct. However, because that usage appears not to be very common, I would change it to an entirely different word in order not to cause difficulty for readers. I changed it to include.

tribalbeeyatch

I hear you. I've got a similar beef with the words 'farther' and 'further'. Most people just use one or the other of them (and rightly so by what I read in the dictionary) but I still can't shake the feeling that 'farther' should refer exclusively to distance in space and 'further' should be reserved for matters of extent or degree.

cheetah

Yeah I am bad about that one for some reason, so I have been extra conscious of that lately and trying to train myself to be careful. It would be hypocritical of me to harp on only one of these...hmmm what's the word for those words that are almost alike? Well, anyway, I fear it is a losing battle...

MollyMac

From m-w.com

Main Entry: syn�o�nym

1 : one of two or more words or expressions of the same language that have the same or nearly the same meaning in some or all senses

I've italicised the significant parts of this sentence myself - this was one of the problems I found when teaching English as a foreign language to advanced students. They'd learn that one word is a synonym of another and then try and use it in exactly the same way, which didn't always work.

One that irritates me is misuse of the verb 'compound' - I frequently hear it used like this:

First, he drank too much then he compounded things by eating too much as well.

:banghead: