Sunday, December 12, 2010

Words That Don't Sound the Way They Look

We learn by doing, so I will dispatch with the phonetic spellings. It's 2010, and there's an information super-highway at our fingertips. Here are my top five:

Minutiae
Verbiage
Foliage
Hyperbole
Antithesis

And now, the most fun of all:

Guerrilla (Variant: Guerilla) - a person who engages in irregular warfare especially as a member of an independent unit carrying out harassment and sabotage. This is employed in modern language to describe use of an unconventional system to achieve a desired result (e.g. "guerrilla marketing").

Gorilla: a very large typically black-colored anthropoid ape (Gorilla gorilla) of equatorial Africa that has a stocky body with broad shoulders and long arms and is less erect and has smaller ears than the chimpanzee

Here is an example of gorilla warfare:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXuXoH6lVkg&feature=related