Miscellaneous Entries.
throw / threw / thrown. So inflected. *”Throwed” is dialectal, appearing mostly in reported speech of nonstandard speakers — e.g.: “‘He just changed direction on me real fast and throwed me,’ he [a cowboy] said.” Dan R. Barber, “Hell on Hooves,” Dallas Morning News, 17 May 2001, at S1.
*thru, a variant spelling of “through,” should be shunned. Oddly, it appears in parts of the Internal Revenue Code applicable to “pass-thru” entities and “look-thru” rules.
thunderous. So spelled — preferably not *”thundrous.”
timbre; timber. These are different words in both British and American English. “Timbre” (/TiM-buhr/ or /TAM-buhr/) is primarily a musical term meaning “tone quality.” E.g.: “Nor was his voice, when he spoke, of a timbre calculated to lull any apprehensions which his aspect might have inspired.” P.G. Wodehouse, The Return of Jeeves 116 (1954). “Timber” (/TiM-buhr/) is the correct form in all other senses.
timeout, in sportswriting and parenting, is increasingly spelled as one word. The plural is “timeouts,” not *”timesout.”
*Invariably inferior form.
For information about the Language-Change Index click here.
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Quotation of the Day: “Words, like clothes, get old-fashioned, or mean and ridiculous, when they have been for some time laid aside.” William Hazlitt, “On Familiar Style” (1822), in Perspectives on Style 112, 116 (Frederick Candelaria ed., 1968).
