by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: November 21, 2008   Last Updated: June 17, 2009

This topic, if addressed accurately, is one that presents a problem with Helium's length minimum and insistence on exactitude. First there is the temptation to pluralize "word" to "words," since misused language is heard and read every day. Writing 400 words about common language errors would present no problem. One could line up a firing squad wall with "like . . .totally . . .awesome . . .hopefully . . irregardless . . . .at . ..literally" and numerous other linguistic miscreants.

The second temptation is to stretch the term "misused" to include misspelled and mispronounced. This could leave room for the delicious ironies: 1) that misspelled is on everyone's list of commonly misspelled words because of the tendency to leave out one of those "s's"; 2) that many English speakers say "pronounciation" instead of the correct "proNUNciation." (Second syllable in all-caps for emphasis, in the absence of italics.)

Temptation three is to expand the topic to include the slangy insertions "you know" and "you see" into spoken language. Being a literalist, my choice is to restrict the discussion to the four-letter word that is the most often misused in the language. The word is ONLY.

The word can act as an adverb, an adjective, or a conjunction. Everyone knows its variations in meaning as used in those ways. The problem is that it is so often misplaced. Ideally it should be located immediately before the words it is to modify or limit. Consider the following examples:

MISUSE "Ralph only knew one person who enjoyed the movie." (This could be misinterpreted to mean that Ralph was the only person who knew someone who enjoyed the movie."

CORRECTION "Ralph knew only one person, Donna Smith, who found the movie enjoyable.

MISUSE "Donna only thought about the handsomeness of the leading man, not whether his character was consistently believable." (This could be interpreted to mean that Donna never thought about anything other than this actor's good looks. She never gave a thought to the plot of the movie, the problem's of global warming, the existence of God, teen pregnancy, etc.)

CORRECTION "While watching the film, Donna thought only about how handsome the leading man was.

Clearly the adverbial "only" is a special case. If one says, "He only has ten dollars," no one is going to seriously interpret either that he and he alone has that amount of money, nor that he is possessed of ten dollars and has no other possessions.

Similarly, when "only" modifies a clause or

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