{"id":1272,"date":"2003-07-04T15:15:21","date_gmt":"2003-07-04T22:15:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/07\/04\/1272.html"},"modified":"2003-07-04T15:15:21","modified_gmt":"2003-07-04T22:15:21","slug":"words-easily-confused-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/07\/04\/words-easily-confused-7\/","title":{"rendered":"Words easily confused #7"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Another entry in an irregular series.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"word-as-word\">skirl<\/span> and <span class=\"word-as-word\">swirl.<\/span> Possibly because it sounds a little like <span class=\"word-as-word\">swirl<\/span> and a little like <span class=\"word-as-word\">skirt,<\/span> a lot of people apparently think <span class=\"word-as-word\">skirl<\/span> means roughly the same thing as <span class=\"word-as-word\">swirl.<\/span>  But <span class=\"word-as-word\">skirl<\/span> actually specifically means the sound that the chanter of a bagpipe makes.  To <span class=\"word-as-word\">skirl<\/span> is to emit such a sound; to <span class=\"word-as-word\">skirl<\/span> a tune is to play it on a bagpipe.<\/p>\n<p>While I'm here, another word that I always used to be unclear on the meaning of: <span class=\"word-as-word\">erstwhile.<\/span>  It doesn't mean the same thing as <span class=\"word-as-word\">esteemed;<\/span> it means <span class=\"word-as-word\">former.<\/span>  This is a word that I picked up from context; I assumed that \"my erstwhile colleague\" (the phrase I usually heard the word in) meant \"my esteemed colleague,\" but it really means \"my former colleague.\"  I wasn't alone in this misunderstanding; many people misuse this word.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another entry in an irregular series. skirl and swirl. Possibly because it sounds a little like swirl and a little&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-words-easily-confused"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}