A colleague was drafting a memo to send out company-wide today and forwarded it to me for review. The copy was mostly good, although he referenced several “servers that will be effected by ongoing work” or somesuch. I replied that, while the memo itself was good, I had a grammatical bone to pick: the servers would be “affected” by the work, not “effected”. He replied that he remained convinced that “e” was the correct word, which sent me on a wild Googling spree.
I have always seen usage in-line with that which I outlined above (this quiz seems to bear out my conclusion – answers are here, for anyone that’s interested), and so I decided to try to run down the definitive answer. Unfortunately, Merriam-Webster is next-to-no help, but, in addition to the quiz mentioned above, I also found a few tips and tricks for remembering the difference and I appeal to no less authority than the Oxford English Dictionary’s site to prove me correct.
Am I off my rocker to be bothered by stuff like this? Should I have objected? After all, I was just trying to keep my colleague from embarrassing himself in a company-wide fashion.
And yes, I know, this makes me a huge, semantic, pedantic, annoying geek. Unfortunately, the intended audience of the email is filled with huge, semantic, pedantic, annoying, geeky engineers. I’m just trying to help a brother out!
Am I The Only One Affected By The Effects Of Grammar?
The Wife and I deal with that all the time where we work, and it’s muich, much worse then that. We constantly have to deal with things that were typed by some folks who just didn’t try very hard in English class…
I am pretty sure it is affected because I don’t think effected is a word.
Oops, never mind, effected is a word, but you are right anyway – it should be affected!
I already wrote about this predicament a while ago but the webpage that you referenced is great for the grammatical errors. I forwarded it to my family as Mom is always correcting us in our grammar. I should forward it to the Clemson football team as well so they can figure out the use of the word WELL instead of GOOD. WE DID GOOD TODAY?!?! AHHHHH!!!
Glad to see gravatars are flipping out!
I think you are in the right to correct your co-worker. He asked for help and you provided it at the highest levels. It would be rude to knowingly allow errors to pass through your sieve of wisdom.
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