Creepy-crawly errors

Three common mistakes suggest visions of slippery, slimy creatures. In each case, it’s a matter of using the wrong word. The first two involve sound-alike words with different spellings and meanings (homophones) and the third one often fools even the grammatically aware.

Unless you want to paint a disgusting word picture, be careful with these expressions:

I’ll wait for the news with baited breath.

The correct word here is bated, not baited. It means held, or abated. It implies waiting for something so exciting you figuratively hold your breath. Baited breath might be one unfortunate result of munching on salmon eggs, night crawlers, or red worms. You could chug an entire tin of Altoids, but it wouldn’t help.

Here’s another confusing one:

Over-watering could leech minerals from your garden soil.

The word you want here is leach (to drain or percolate, depleting the soil of a beneficial substance). Leeches are blood-sucking worms once used by physicians to drain blood from human patients. Eeew!

I heard this one on the radio recently:

A poisonous albino cobra has escaped and is considered extremely dangerous.

This one’s tricky, but here is the distinction: Poisonous refers to substances you might ingest, breathe, or touch. Toxic chemicals, vapors, or deadly contact irritants might be poisonous. The correct word for a deadly snake or lizard is venomous (capable of shooting or injecting a toxin into its victim). So, unless you mean that eating it could kill you—like improperly prepared pufferfish sushi—the word you want is venomous.



Now that we’re clear on all of that, I don’t recommend eating bait, pufferfish, or cobra. The first two are just scary and, as for the third, I hear it tastes like chicken anyway.

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