You cite the author in an endnote; you visit a Web site or the site of the crime, and you sight your beloved running toward you in slow motion on the beach (a sight for sore eyes!).
You travel to see the sights. It’s called not “siteseeing” but sightseeing.
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It is not uncommon to see people writing “down the shoot” when they mean “down the chute.”
A chute is a sloping channel things move down along. It comes from the French word for “to fall.”
But if you are a shipper of Chinese groceries you could shoot cans of bamboo shoots down a chute to the loading dock.
“Chute” is also short for “parachute,” but people rarely misspell it in that sense.
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Catholics routinely refer to their church as the Church, with a capital “C.” This irritates the members of other churches, but is standard usage. When “Church” stands by itself (that is, not as part of a name like “First Methodist Church”) you should normally capitalize it only to mean “Roman Catholic Church.” Note that protestant theologians and other specialists in religion do refer to the whole body of Christians as “the Church,” but this professional usage is not common in ordinary writing.
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In casual conversation, you may get by with saying “Chuck [throw] me that monkey wrench, will you?” But you will mark yourself as illiterate beyond mere casualness by saying instead “Chunk me that wrench.” This is a fairly common substitution in some dialects of American English.
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You chose tequila last night; you choose aspirin this morning. “Chose” is the past tense, “choose” the present.
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To course is to run. The most familiar use of this meaning of the word is in “racecourse”: a place where races are run. When the blood runs strongly through your veins, it courses through them. Metaphorically we speak of strong emotions like fear, exhilaration, and passion as coursing through our veins.
Some people mistakenly substitute “curse” and think these feelings are cursing through their veins. This might make some sort of sense with negative emotions, but note that the expression is also used of positive ones. Stick with coursing.
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A “curb” was originally a device used to control an unruly horse. Already in the 18th century people were speaking by analogy of controlling their appetites as “curbing” them. You do not “curve” your hunger, appetite, desires, etc. You curb them.
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“Current” is an adjective having to do with the present time, and can also be a noun naming a thing that, like time, flows: electrical current, currents of public opinion. “Currant” refers only to little fruits.
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“Cue” has a variety of meanings, but all uses of “queue” relate to its original French meaning of “tail,” which becomes a metaphor for a line (beware, however: in French queue is also rude slang for the male sex organ). Although a few dictionaries accept “cue” as an alternative spelling for the braided tail some people make of their hair or a waiting line, traditionally both are queues: “Sun Yat Sen ordered that all Chinese men should cut off their queues,” “I have over 300 movies in my Netflix queue.”
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An astounding number of people write “cut of tea” when they mean “cup of tea,” especially in phrases like “not my cut of tea” instead of “not my cup of tea.” This saying is not about fine distinctions between different ways the tea’s been harvested; it just refers to the ordinary vessel from which you drink the stuff.
Is this mistake influenced by the expression “the cut of his jib” or is it just a goofy typo?
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