More commonly confused words.

Stayed/ staid

As most Thai English users know, the familiar verb stayed is the past tense form of to stay. Staid is an adjective describing something or someone traditional and unadventurous, or somewhat boring or unsurprising. A staid person might be described by the English idiom a stick-in-the-mud. A staid person, like a stick-in-the-mud, is a party pooper, someone who sits or stays in one place and will not try something else. The verb stayed and adjective staid both originate from the verb to stay, but in the case of staid the word means someone who stayed in one place too long and became staid.

Thai fans will also be able to enjoy face-to-face interaction with the band through special games and an in-depth interview on the rather staid topic “Thai-Spanish Cultural Exchange,” plus a performance that has been specially prepared for the Bangkok fan-meeting.

Care was taken to retain the colourful nature of the house rather than transform it into a staid museum. The restoration works, covered by the foundation, cost Bt6 million and the Fine Arts department registered the house as a national heritage.

Beyond a cumbersome organisation structure, GM’s close brush with bankruptcy late last year can be partly traced to a staid corporate culture, which plagued its operations for decades and prevented it from adapting to a changing world.

Downtown Ulaan Baatar was quiet and staid then.

Nasty bedbug bites cover woman who stayed at Astor on the Park hotel on Central Park West, New York.

Beyoncé stayed in an incredible Airbnb home that cost $10,000 a night during her stop in San Francisco for the Super Bowl.

Mansion where Jackie Kennedy stayed before wedding to JFK destroyed by fire.

In fact, in India and Nepal, my traveling companion, who also took the tablets, and I were the only ones who stayed healthy even though the others in our group assiduously avoided those foods and we did not.

Perpetuate/ perpetrate

To perpetuate something means to keep it going, to maintain and continue it. The verb originally comes from the Latin for continuing throughout. It is associated with the word perpetual, meaning never changing or uninterrupted. Perpetrate means to do something bad, often a crime. Often the noun perpetrators is used for people who perpetrate such an act, and in English language countries, the term perpetrator is commonly used by police departments to refer to criminals. For this reason, it is good to try not to write perpetrate when what is meant is perpetuate, since the word perpetrate has criminal associations. Perpetrate originates from a different Latin word, meaning to bring about or bring to completion. One way to keep the two verbs separate might be to think of them with other words like them, for example other verbs ending with the letters trate:

administrate

arbitrate

concentrate

demonstrate

illustrate

infiltrate

orchestrate

penetrate

Or verbs ending with the letters uate:

accentuate

attenuate

effectuate

equate

evacuate

evaluate

fluctuate

infatuate

insinuate

perpetuate

reevaluate

situate

Try to think of little stories that associate similar words:

We have to evaluate whether to perpetuate the class or evacuate the classroom.

We must concentrate and demonstrate that some people are trying to perpetrate a crime.

The more similar words that come to mind, the less likely it is that perpetuate will be confused with perpetrate. Examples:

The fact could not be ignored that officials in charge of implementing the policy appeared to ignore Order No 66/2557 and took harsh action against poor people, so as to perpetuate evictions.

Myths that Donald Trump perpetuates about Donald Trump.

Since the situation is most unlikely to improve anytime soon, Thai society should at least try to understand why a number of men and even women keep using sexist words and stereotypical remarks that perpetuate the notion that women are innately inferior and dishonourable. Are some people perpetuating misogyny for fear of losing the culture of male domination?

The perpetuation of debt amounts to a form of forced labour, the report said.

Hillary Clinton told a journalist in Las Vegas that racist rhetoric can trigger unstable people to perpetrate mass shootings.

A Dutch social psychologist perpetrated an audacious academic fraud by making up studies that told the world what it wanted to hear about human nature.

Apple growers have invented a short harvest season to get people in and their apples out, but some say it is all a fiction perpetrated by the fruit industrial complex.

Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, a U. S. senator insisted that global climate change was the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

The New York Daily News perpetrated an interesting, yet subtly misleading headline about the president’s Charleston, South Carolina speech.

Subjected to/ subject to

To be subjected to something means to be treated in a certain way, sometimes unpleasantly. People who are subjected to something are exposed to an experience which is not enjoyable. To be subject to something just means that it applies to you and liable to happen. It also can mean dependent on, that something will happen subject to some conditions. Since subjected to has a negative meaning, although not as negative as perpetrate, it is better not to confuse it with subject to. Examples:

Property, stocks, automobiles and cash are the four assets that will become subject to inheritance tax effective on February 1.

The completion of this joint venture will be subject to the satisfaction of all regulatory requirements and customary closing conditions.

The deal is subject to merger approval from European authorities.

Article 11 of the law states that factories are subject to business suspensions of between 10 and 30 days if they are found to employ less than five illegal workers.

The driver was not even subjected to a blood-alcohol test.

Those who earn more than Bt4 million a year are subjected to a 35-per-cent tax, but they actually paid only 27.82 per cent on average after availing themselves of the full benefits from tax deduction measures.

The selected job agencies are then subjected to verification by Thailand’s Labour Ministry before they can start recruiting workers, he said.

Meanwhile, Thai products will remain subjected to some tariff rates, which range from 6.4 per cent to above 20 per cent.

One way to separate the two expressions is to think that the adjective form, subject to, describes a certain situation that may happen, while the verb subjected to is actively about something that did happen and may not have been fun. If students are subject to taking a final exam before graduation, that just means they must take the exam before they can graduate. If we say the students were subjected to a final exam, it suggests that the exam was especially painful and unpleasant.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)