More commonly confused words

Adieu/ ado

The noun in English adieu means farewell or goodbye, usually used in a literary sense, since it was originally a French word.  In French, the word means to God, meaning that whoever said it was trusting in God that the person who was leaving would travel safely and reach a destination without problems. The Spanish word Adios has the same meaning and origins. One good way to avoid confusing the two words adieu and ado would be to remember the Spanish word Adios. Like Adieu, Adios also begins with the letters adi. It may seem very complex to think of words in three separate languages in order to remember how to spell some basic words in English. Yet it is a useful reminder that many words in English derive from other languages. For anyone writing a research paper or academic thesis, it might be a better strategy to just use more common words that mean the same thing, such as farewell or goodbye.

The noun ado ‎refers to a lot of trouble or fuss or bother. There is a well-known play by William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing. The title of this comedy written around the year 1598 refers to a lot of fuss for little or no reason. Possibly because of the association with Shakespeare, the word ado is also seen as literary and for academic writing in Thai English, it is probably best to choose a simpler alternative with the same meaning, such as fuss or bother or trouble. Journalists sometimes produce variants of the term much ado about something, whatever the subject of their articles may be. While acceptable in newspaper and magazine articles, this type of joke may be somewhat informal for research papers. To remember the spelling of ado, it may help if we tell ourselves a little story involving Adobe Acrobat Reader, the popular software on most computers, used for viewing, printing, and commenting on PDF documents. If we imagine that there is much ado about Adobe Acrobat Reader, then we may recall the three letters used to spell the word ado correctly. For academic writers who insist on using the terms adieu and ado, here are some usage examples:

• Sahamongkol filed a lawsuit stating that Jaa was in breach of contract for appearing in the film, because he was committed to them exclusively until 2023. However, after the film distributor UIP appealed to the court, the ban was lifted and both “Furious 7” and later “SPL 2” screened without further ado, earning plenty of money as well as accolades.
• Much ado about gold: Is there still a shiny future?
• Much ado over refinery IPO.
• The two offenders at Silom were arrested and reprimanded with so much ado, but we rarely see drug pushers being paraded around for chastisement, or their pictures circulated widely on Twitter or Facebook.
• Their future here has been uncertain since last year, when their daughter Lin Ping bid adieu to Thailand, the country of her birth, to seek out a mate of her own back in China. Lin Ping’s departure left a generation of Thai panda lovers in deep mourning, buoyed only by the hope that she would eventually return, with her mate.
• Shanghai auto fair says adieu to attractive models.
• Scandals and controversies, which might end up in South Korean coach Choi Young-seuk bidding adieu to Thai taekwondo, have left a big question mark over the future of the Taekwondo Association of Thailand.
• Indian PM Manmohan Singh’s apologetic adieu.

Adverse / averse

The adjective adverse ‎means unfavourable, working against, or opposing something.  A common phrase using the word adverse is adverse circumstances, a polite way of saying that things are not going well. Averse is also an adjective, usually describing a person who is unwilling to do something, or dislikes something, or is reluctant to do something. One way to tell the two words apart is to remember that averse is most often about someone, while adverse is usually about things. If we associate adverse with other words starting with the letters adv, it may help us to remember the correct spelling. These include:

advancement

advantageous

advantages

adventurer

adverb

adversarial

advertisement

advisability

Note that the word adversarial, often used to describe a relationship or situation, like the word adverse refers to opposing views, or things that work against one another. Here are some usage examples:

• Besides higher prices for public services and adverse weather, Long said, a rising money supply, foreign-exchange pressures and costlier imported products might be other reasons for higher inflation in Vietnam.
• The National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) also pointed out that the growing elderly population will have an adverse overall economic impact on Thailand as there will be a shortage of labour and reduced economic productivity.
• Adverse factors point to more pressure on kyat.
• The hearts of so many locals in Udon Thani’s Prachaksinlapakhom district are heavy because of the pending project to launch mining operations in their hometown area. They are seriously worried about possible pollution and adverse impacts on their health…Somporn insisted APPC should clearly identify the measures it would use to prevent any adverse impacts on local people from the mining operations.
• Adverse court ruling could sink government’s water plans.
• The MRC, the only body regulating the river, states that all neighbouring countries have to be notified in advance if any water is diverted from the river, though this cannot guarantee the avoidance of any adverse impacts as this rule does not require anything serious other than a notification. Pumping water out of rivers, apart from having an adverse environmental impact, can also trigger conflicts between countries.
• New research carried out by my colleague Dr. Jirawat Pampiemas and me in a quasi-experimental evaluation shows a potentially adverse impact on the academic performance of Thai students using computers, as measured by the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of mathematics and science scores.
• Peak oil will have an adverse effect on all economies.
• Parties not averse to poll delay.
• If there was one winner in the region, it was the yen. Surrounded by volatile Asian currencies, the lower-yielding yen is often seen as a haven for the risk averse and benefited from its reputation for stability, making some gains from the flight to safety away from other Asian currencies. These gains might be temporary, however.
• Senators not averse to MPs having small shareholding.
• Averse to rain, Germans camp indoors.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)