Commonly confused words in English.

Illusion / allusion.

An illusion is something that seems true but is not. Professional magicians and other performers have the job of creating illusions, making audiences believe they are seeing things that are not actually happening. An allusion is a way of speaking that mentions something in an indirect way.

A newly discovered species of wasp has been named A. mon, an allusion to the geographic origin of the wasp in Thailand, since the Mon people are one of the earliest known ethnic groups in the Kingdom.

Check out what is in store at the optical illusion museum in Thailand.

As Buddhism teaches the impermanence of human life, it also affirms that the “aspiration of art towards permanence is but an illusion.”

The Democracy Monument has four wings standing 24 meters high, an allusion to June 24, the day the Thai constitution was signed.

The governor of Bangkok likes to compare his job with a gardener’s; the allusion is a reminder that he likes to think about the environment.

At Chiang Mai’s Art in Paradise, visitors are encouraged to get interactive by posing against or on the paintings to appreciate the illusions created by the artworks.

Proceedings/ proceeding/ preceding.

Every student or ajarn who spends time in a library will know that proceedings refers to a collection of academic papers, usually published after an academic conference. The term proceedings is always written in the plural, with a letter s at the end, yet often in Thai English it is mistakenly written without the letter s. This confuses it with the verb proceeding, which means having to do with going ahead or moving along. Published records of what has happened at a meeting are proceedings. The letter s is needed because typically several different speeches or articles or contributions are put together in one volume. For this reason, they are proceedings, even if published in a single book. These records are usually printed before a conference or after it is over. They are useful as evidence of the research and preparation that went into any such scholarly gathering, but are also often important for future researchers, who base their newer projects on what has been done in the past. Depending on who prints them, proceedings may fall into the category of grey literature.

Grey literature is a term that developed over the past few decades to describe works that are printed, sometimes by private groups or societies, without the help of an established publisher:

That which is produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commercial publishers.

Such items may be valid results of research but because they do not have an established professional publisher, they seem to belong to a different category of printed material from those proceedings which are published, for example, by the Oxford University Press or other well-known source of academic material. Apart from conference proceedings, the category of grey literature may also include

research and project reports, annual or activity reports, theses, preprints, working papers, newsletters, technical reports, recommendations and technical standards, patents, technical notes, data and statistics, presentations, field notes, laboratory research books, academic courseware, lecture notes, evaluations, and others.

There is so much of this material that GreyNet International, the Grey Literature Network Service was founded in 1992 to encourage the publication of and open access to it. Obviously, valid and useful reports of all kinds from government, academic, and industrial sources are printed in electronic and print versions which are not involved with commercial publishing. By commercial publishing, it is simply meant that whoever prints the material is not mainly in the business of printing books. Conference proceedings, even if not published by a well-known press, are still edited, although standards may vary. Papers are typically read before they are approved for inclusion in any conference proceedings.

An alternate meaning for the word proceedings, also with the letter s at the end, refer to any court case, as in the term criminal proceedings. In Thai English, the letter s is often wrongly left out of this usage as well.

Major local information technology companies have confirmed they will be proceeding with their investment projects as planned this year.

The Thailand TESOL International Conference Proceedings 2015.

The National Legislative Assembly has passed a bill amending the Civil Procedure Code to allow class action legal proceedings in Thailand.

Conservation of Medicinal Plants: Proceedings of an International Consultation, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 21-27 March 1988.

There are also multiple alternative dispute resolutions available in Thailand including arbitration proceedings with the Thai Arbitration Institute.

One important feature of Thai bankruptcy law that differs from other jurisdictions is that only a creditor may initiate bankruptcy proceedings against a debtor.

All court proceedings are required to be conducted in Thai language, except in some special courts.

Keep in mind that proceedings and proceeding should not be confused with the word preceding, which refers to something that goes before or happened earlier or was already mentioned before.

In the case mentioned in the preceding section, it may be found that the transferee lacks qualifications to be an owner of a Thai vessel.

Upon receipt of the preceding required documents, the CS office will then provide certification to the Thai Department of Commercial Registration in the Ministry of Commerce that the applying business organization is an American-owned and managed company and is therefore entitled to national treatment under the provisions of the Thailand Treaty of Amity.

The medication is contraindicated in case of preceding or existing venous thromboembolic events.

Uninterested/ disinterested.

Native English speakers sometimes confuse these two words in addition to Thai English writers. To be uninterested means to not care about something, or be bored by it. This is a commonly used word, but the word disinterested appears more rarely. It refers to someone who does something even though there is no personal interest or advantage involved. A disinterested person gains nothing by doing whatever it is, but does so anyway. Clearly these two words have very different meanings, so the best approach may be to avoid writing disinterested and just use a different word with the same meaning, such as unprejudiced, impartial, neutral, or non-partisan. That way you can avoid confusing disinterested with uninterested.

Thailand expects long-term disinterested cooperation from Beijing.

The ajarn did not succeed in making rules of English grammar seem like fun to the uninterested students.

To be a great performer of Thai traditional music, years of the most disinterested self-sacrifice and effort are required. If you are uninterested in Thai traditional music, you are unlikely to try.

Note that the following frequent usage is wrong, and should be avoided:

We did not enjoy our holiday to the Similan Islands and the Surin Islands because in these places, the hotel staff was disinterested.

The best way to make this kind of observation would be to write that the hotel staff was inattentive insofar as they did not pay proper professional attention to guests.

(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).