Wednesday, May 20, 2015

ad nauseum/ad nauseam: Common Errors in English Usage Entry for Wednesday, May 20, 2015

ad nauseum/ad nauseam
Seeing how often ad nauseam is misspelled makes some people want to throw up. English writers also often mistakenly half-translate the phrase as ad nausea.

This Latin phrase comes from a term in logic, the argumentum ad nauseam, in which debaters wear out the opposition by just repeating arguments until they get sick of the whole thing and give in.

 
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This is the ten-year anniversary of the Common Errors in English Usage calendar. To celebrate, we are bringing back some of our favorite interesting, funny, but sometimes merely silly entries through the years before going on hiatus in 2016.

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