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Handy synonym9/19/2023 ![]() ![]() (Handy trick: both words end in m.)įor example: “Who/whom are you going to Brazil with?” Would you answer “With him,” or “With he”? You’d choose him – so whom is correct! 5. If ‘hi m’ could be the answer, ‘who m’ is your word. But how can you tell which one you need? Try answering your own question with ‘him’ or ‘he’. Who knew such a little word could be so confusing! In English, we use ‘who’ to refer to a sentence’s subject and ‘whom’ to its object. This means that although it technically exists, it shouldn’t be thrown about by people who’d like to learn and use English well. So remember: While ‘irregardless’ appears in dictionaries, it’s listed as a nonstandard word. ‘Regardless’ means “without regard” or “despite something” (“He maxed out his credit card regardless of the consequences,”) and is perfectly acceptable.īut despite what you might think, ‘irregardless’ isn’t a synonym! Because of it’s double negative (the prefix -ir means “not” and suffix -less means “without”) it means “not without regard”, which is actually the opposite of what its users intend. You might have heard people use ‘irregardless’ when they mean to say ‘regardless’. Truthfully, irony is not an essential ingredient to a regular day and no one will think badly of you if you don’t use the word at all! 3. So what should you do in the face of such confusion? One option is to…let it go. But wait! There’s also dramatic irony, situational irony, historical irony and others. However, unlike sarcasm (which also does this), irony is not intended to hurt. While the concept of irony is extremely multi-layered, at its most simple it’s a way to use words to express the opposite of their literal meaning. (In fact, as Alanis Morissette’s famous song, Ironic – with around 10 poor examples of irony – shows us, coincidences and unfortunate events aren’t enough.) (No, really – we could write a whole course on using irony correctly!) While irony is often understood to mean a coincidence or strange turn of events, that in itself doesn’t cover its full meaning. Here is a word that has confused almost all English speakers – native or otherwise. Interestingly, because of the sheer reach of its incorrect use, the Oxford English Dictionary has included an informal use for ‘literally’ allowing it as a tool to give emphasis, like in the above examples. ![]() ‘Literally’ means, “in a literal sense”, or “what I’m saying is not imagined, but truly happened as I’m saying it.” Therefore, popular uses like “I literally died laughing,” or “He was so embarrassed his cheeks literally burned up,” are not correct. Misuse of this word has been known to raise people’s blood pressure. If you know a language purist, watch out. As a follow up to our article on confusing words, here are ten of the most difficult words in English. Sometimes they’re difficult to understand, other times they’ve been misused so often that their original meaning has gotten lost. ![]() ![]() This defines a Haskell function (and the function is exhaustive since A only has one constructor, and we've handled it).English can be a real pest, and even native speakers find themselves stumbling over some stubbornly tricky words. The last line says "when I see an expression that says P n (PrivateA a), construct a PrivateB n a". The second line says "when I see a pattern of the form P n a, pretend it says PrivateB n (PrivateA -> a)". The first line, of course, is the type declaration. It's also useful when defining pattern synonyms. It really just moves the function call to the other side of the equal sign, which can be handy for writing terse code in some situations. The compiler doesn't (and can't) check that the two expressions make cohesive sense as a pair, so we could use it to do some nonsense like this pattern Nonsense :: Int -> Int In short, we can specify explicitly how we want an expression to behave in pattern context and how we want it to behave in expression context. So GHC provides us with an extended syntax called explicitly bidirectional patterns. This is the simplest form, and it's useful in "simple" cases where the arguments are nicely oriented.īut the real world isn't that simple. It says "I can use FortyTwo to construct an A, and if I have an A, I can use FortyTwo to pattern match on it". Now, the pattern syntax you're using for FortyTwo is called implicitly bidirectional. First, remember that newtype can only be used with data constructors that have a single argument, so your A can be newtype but B can't. ![]()
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