In lieu of

"The downward move of the pound against the dollar is especially significant in lieu of the problems in the US economy," said a financial reporter the other day. Of course he meant ". . . in view of . . .."

I have often heard that misuse of "in lieu of."  In lieu of means in place of, as in "The school claims that its lunch menu conforms to the mandated pyramid. Following President Reagan's advice, they use Ketchup in lieu of a more traditional vegetable as one of the pyramid's building blocks."

Suspect vs suspicious

Listening to CNBC today, I heard a talking head discussing stocks that pay big dividends. His point was that reduced earnings might cause those companies to cut their dividends. "Investors should be suspect," he said.

I'm surprised at how often I hear people make that mistake. Suspect means questionable. Suspicious means questioning. Investors should be suspicious.

Similar words

Sometimes you think you're saying one thing, but you're really saying something else. Here are a few examples.

Apprise = inform.  Appraise = determine the value of.

Keep me apprised. I don't need to be appraised, thanks.

Regard = attention.  Regards = greetings.

In regard to the matter at hand .  .  ..    Regards are appreciated but irrelevant.

Imminent = about to happen.  Eminent = prominent and respected.

We may have an imminent problem, but it's not eminent.

Principal = most important.  Principle = underlying rule.

Our principal problem and our principle problem are two different things.

There are many more.

Appears or is displayed

Most procedures in user guides contain steps that look like this:

. . .

3. Click Add.

   The Add User dialog box appears.

4. . . .    

I've heard that some experts claim "appears" suggests something magical and insist on saying ". . . dialog box is displayed." The reason is silly and the gratuitous passive voice expression that results is annoying.

Users are easier to write for than the user

You can solve a lot of problems relating to "gender neutrality" simply by using plural subjects. 

For example, "The File menu enables users to maintain their files" works well, while writing the same thing for "the user" leads to awkward sentences like "The File menu enables the user to maintain his/her/its files" or the ear-grating "The File menu enables the user to maintain their files."

Hyphens

Twelve years ago the members of the copyediting-L list engaged in an exercise to resolve, or at least clarify, some disputed issues. First we identified issues, then we assigned people to advocate on each side of each issue. 

I argued then against hyphenating the word "email," but the majority on the list wanted to give the hyphenated version more time to evolve into the unhyphenated version. Well, they've had plenty of time, but the same people who never hyphenated the word (Sun, Wired, and many others) still don't, and the ones who advocated hyphens (Microsoft and the "mainstream" publishers) still use them.

I say it's time to give the hyphens a rest and agree to spell comon terms like email and website solid.

Useless words

I don't remember who first suggested this, but somewhere along the line -- years ago -- I read the suggestion that you can always improve your sentences -- with no change in meaning -- by omitting every instance of the word "very." 

Since then I've never come across a sentence that was better with "very" than without.

This applies to other imprecise adverbs like "extremely" or "quite." 

I wonder what other words are useless.