I just noticed that "tentative" is not infrequently misspelled "tenative". On reflection, this is not surprising, because in North American speech, it is often pronounced this way, much as "dentist" is pronounced "dennis" in informal contexts.
However, that is no excuse.
"Tentative" has three t's. Something tentative is an attempt, and the words both have the same Latin source, temptare (to try, to tempt). So think of "attempt" when you are writing "tentative".
Drives me NUTS! CNN and all the other broadcasters drop the second "t" all the time, even in the bottom-of-the-screen crawl. Thank you for giving voice to the silent miseries of bad spelling and grammar ;)
ReplyDeleteAnd Greg or Gregg is spelled with 2 "G"'s or 3 "G"'s, not 1 "G" or 2 as is often, incorrectly asked.
ReplyDelete