Tell us what your problems are.

Effect and Affect are my bugbears. I think I finally figured out which one to use when, but it's still a bit wobbly. I did learn that the confusion goes back to at least the 1600's.

Mine too, Beth. And once I get past all the ones that either look or sound exactly the same there are all those little verbs of being that you can work around, but never seem to get quite right.

In addition: Affect can meat to feign but more importantly only effect can be used as a noun. Effect should not be used as a verb with the meaning of to influence.

e.g: The affect of this war... (is WRONG)

should be: The effect...

Pharon -- I don't think that's quite right, "the affect of trash" part, I mean. To affect is to have an influence on something. "This is how it affects me." To effect, is for something to HAVE an influence upon one. "The smell of this trash is having a bad effect on my sinuses." One is active (Affect), the other passive ,

Funny, as a non-native English speaker, I think I have no trouble at all with effect and affect, since both words derive from Latin.

I agree with Merry Andrew. To affect is to move emotionally and, secondarily, to pretend (hence the derivatives affection and affected).

Effect, as Craven noticed, is not a verb, and has two different meanings: one is as a consequence, a result; the other -and the cause of this discussion- is as a sensation, an impression, an emotion.

As for the original question, as a speaker of English as a foreign language, I have a little trouble in several aspects.

My pronunciation, they say, is Californian (not East L.A!), even if I learned the language in St. Louis and then hung around mostly with New Yorkers. But some words I have to listen to first to know how they're pronounced. I think there are no rules. For instance: Why is the ending of the word pronounced differently in "China" and "Argentina"?
The first time I was in London I felt I was forgetting the language, but then I met a woman from Sacramento who said she was relieved to speak to someone who she could understand easily.
I mean, I ask a cabbie to take me to Cheswick and he says: "Oh, to Cheesick, you mean".


In grammar, sometimes I fail in proper sentence construction, but my big trouble is with some propositions. "In", "On" and "At". ("I saw it at the movies", "I saw it in the movies", "It was on a movie"... I get confused).

Vocabulary: English is very rich, there is usually a word derived from Latin, if I can't find the common one. The only problem is the new slang. I come out with some words that make me look older than I really am.

BTW effect is a verb as well as a noun.

That's what happens when you don't play as home team.

Well, English is capable of making verbs out of every noun.

Like "President Bush helicoptered to Camp David...".

For me, it's the words out of Old English (rough, through, their)which drive me around the bend, their formational rules being so ridiculously arbitrary, and then, inconsistent anyway. Though they make up a very small percentage of the modern English lexicon, some 180 of the 200 most commonly used terms come out of the Germanic/Old English (if I recall correctly).

All very interesting . . . i studied Anglo-saxon and old- and middle-english when i was in college. At one time, i could read Beowulf without a gloss. That was almost 40 years ago, though, and now, i'm not even sure i've spelled that correctly.

Sometimes, i get a little alarmed (although not too much) when i see that university-educated people in the modern world can neither write a clear hand (calligraphy) nor spell the words correctly (orthography). Before anyone busts me for my spelling, i'm not talking about the typos we all make, or the occassional errors we all sometimes make. I'm talking about well-educated (ostensibly) people who don't know that the word "you're" exists, and use "your" in every situation, whether as a possessive pronoun, or when in speech they would use the contraction with the same pronunciation meaning you are.

It runs much deeper in society, and probably saddens more than alarms me. A well-known author of science-fiction and -fantasy, whom i will not name (The Boat of a Million Years . . . heeheehee) completely bolixed the second person singular in a novel in which he had Quakers for characters. He used "thee" for the subjective and "thou" for the objective. What is more appalling, is the thought that this slipped right by his editor. Reading posts on-line can be a nightmare for anyone (such as petty old Setanta) who revels in the glory of language.

By the way, in a totally irrelevant note, the Quakers are the Quakers because of the following incident: George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, and some of his followers were haled into court for seditious activity (which is to say, they were spreading their beliefs in the bailliwick of someone with influence who didn't particularly like them). When the Lord Lieutenant called the court to order, old George Fox leapt up and shouted: "Tremble before the awful majesty of God's judgment!" To which the Lord Lieutenant replied: "Yes, well, if the Quakers will all be seated, we can proceed."

eBeth is linguistically challenged, you know . . . like all Canajuns . . . she can't spell center correctly, and finds it impossible to pronounce schedule correctly. But as she is otherwise a sweet, lovely lady, we should all overlook this . . .

Having dug my grave deeply enough, i will depart . . .

heeheeheeheeheehee

okseeyahbye

ehBeth

I'll hold him down, you insert the bamboo slivers. We'll teach him how to spell rigour before it sets in.

That must be your Northwest Mounted Police heritage coming through . . . I'm sure the Menonites would just have stoned me to death, or maybe burned me . . .

heeheeheeheeheeheehee


Gettin' cold as hell, eh, think i'll head to Coffee Time fer a doughnut . . .

ehBeth

Make that ELEVEN bamboo slivers.

Fear not, blatham. Setanta will be dealt with. He will be forced to take the dogs to the nearest Coffee Time and share a donut with them the next time he hits this borough.

Should we add slithers to the slivers?

Bring on the angry asps!

tee hee

Hah! Just to add to the affect/effect discussion - affect is also a noun. It is a semi-technical word in psychological/psychiatric discourse and means the emotional state or the emotional expression of someone/something.

Eg - "Her affect was flat" means that she was expressing very little emotion.

Yeh, both words -- affect and effect -- can be either nouns or verbs, depending upon usage. The English language makes it very easy to transform a noun into a verb. Someone -- fbaezer, I think -- has already mentioned "helicoptering." There are literally hundreds of examples like that with new ones being added every day. Just a few years ago it would have sounded strange to say that one could "access" something. One could HAVE access, that's all. And when I was a wee-'un there was no such verb as 'parenting.' We raised kids, we WERE parents, but we didn't parent.

Some people don't like the practice of making verbs out of nouns, but I think it is one of the best things about English, it makes it more expressive.

I finally found a 'definition' that helped me sort the affect/effect problem out for me. A site google sent me to when i said 'affect + effect + confusion' said that if there is nothing psychological that can be attributed to the situation, the right word would be 'effect'.

Not sure why i'd never caught onto that before.