--- title: 5 Common Words That Used to Be Totally Unacceptable description: Like bring-tears-to-an-English-teacher's-eye unacceptable canonical: https://time.com/4293303/garner-common-words-mistakes/ author: Katy Steinmetz article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-04-14T20:31:44.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T07:31:37.111Z og:title: 5 Common Words That Used to Be Totally Unacceptable og:description: Like bring-tears-to-an-English-teacher's-eye unacceptable og:url: https://time.com/4293303/garner-common-words-mistakes/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0cd887450bc441ff/69888f3f428a9e4888cd23d1/dictionary.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 5700 og:image:height: 3800 og:image:alt: 121330338 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 5 Common Words That Used to Be Totally Unacceptable twitter:description: Like bring-tears-to-an-English-teacher's-eye unacceptable twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0cd887450bc441ff/69888f3f428a9e4888cd23d1/dictionary.jpg?branch=production ---  # 5 Words You Use All the Time That Were Once Totally Unacceptable ## Video: Do You Know These SAT Words? [Watch (HLS stream): Do You Know These SAT Words?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/2mc1HLdf.m3u8) (2:40)  _Published 2016-02-16. MONEY staffers sat down and tried to guess. Some got it right. Some...not so much._ by [Katy Steinmetz](/author/katy-steinmetz/) ## Katy Steinmetz Apr 14, 2016 8:31 PM CUT  Courtesy of Oxford University Press by [Katy Steinmetz](/author/katy-steinmetz/) ## Katy Steinmetz Apr 14, 2016 8:31 PM CUT Attention language lubbers: the fourth edition of _Garner’s Modern English Usage_ is out this month, and while it’s as full of pedantry as any guide on how to properly wield the English language, the new version is also funnier and more data-driven than any reference you’ve likely come across in school. By using searchable databases like [Google Ngrams](https://books.google.com/ngrams "undefined"), lexicographer Bryan Garner has developed ratios for how often words or phrases, one standard and one upstart, are used in published writing. And he has developed his own five-stage system for how widespread a “mistake” has become, from being something sloppy and offensive-to-the-educated to perfectly unobjectionable. Garner describes himself as something of a linguistic “epidemiologist,” tracking mistakes that spread within a population, sometimes escalating to pandemic levels and then, perhaps, reaching a point at which human bodies have all adapted to the virus and it becomes the new normal. Garner provides several charming analogies in his preface for how readers of the book should understand his five-stage system of acceptability, one of which is this: **Stage 1:** Audible flatulence **Stage 2**: Audible belching **Stage 3:** Overloud talking **Stage 4:** Elbows on the table **Stage 5:** Refined Take _buck naked_ and _butt naked_. While professional editors still tend to stick to the more traditional _buck naked_—which may have been inspired by “the skin of bare buttocks” being reminiscent of a male deer’s soft hide—_butt naked_ is by far the favorite in popular usage these days, according to Garner’s analysis. He categorizes the use of _butt naked_ as “Stage 4,” meaning everybody’s using it “except a few stalwart holdouts” who might be principled but should also be preparing for defeat. As Garner says, “There’s almost a universal rule that any two words that resemble each other in some way will be confounded.” Here follow five examples of confounded words that have shifted from being abhorred to standard. **_contact_** **(as a verb instead of a noun): Stage 5** We might think of this verb as being as normal as _to_ _be_ or _to not be_ today. But there was a time when using _contact_ as a verb (“Contact me later”) rather than a noun (“Avoid contact with angry bees”) had grammarians snapping their monocles. This is a good example, Garner notes, of a usage that had appeal because it was efficient. “It was a huge bugbear in the 1920s and 1930s,” he says of people using it as a verb. “But people like brevity. They don’t want to say _get in touch with,_ and they don’t want to say _call, email, text or leave a note at my door._” Gradually, he says, “it’s lost all the bad odor.” **_nauseous_** **instead of** **_nauseated_** **: Stage 4** Have you ever said you felt nauseous? In the traditional sense that would mean you felt like you were capable of causing others to woof cookies, not that you were feeling sick to your own stomach—much along the lines of how _poisonous_ and _poisoned_ work. Garner, who is something of a stalwart holdout himself, views _nauseous_ as a “skunked term,” a label he coined for a word that gives off “a bad order” to someone whether it’s used correctly or incorrectly. His advice: just don’t use it at all. **_graduate from_** **instead of** **_to be graduated from:_** **Stage 5** Your great-great-great grandparents, Garner says, might have insisted that they “were graduated from” college, because it was the school that was bestowing a level of achievement on graduates after all. By the 19th century, your grandparents might have “graduated from” college, and if you’re over 30, you probably did too. Young people today, he says, are now dropping the “from” and simply saying they “graduated college,” which he classifies as Stage 3\. “I wish I didn’t have uncharitable thoughts every time I hear somebody say _I graduated college_,” Garner says, “but I do.” **_spitting image_** **instead of** **_spit and image_** **: Stage 5** As Garner explains, the original _spit and image_ came “from the notion of God’s using spit and dust to form the clay to make Adam in his image.” In fact, people used to say things like, “Tom is the very spit of his uncle!” But the corruption has become so common that using the original today might not only stop a conversation in its tracks but cause unpleasant face-scrunching. Per Garner, _spitting image_ is now 23 times more commonly used than its precursor. **_self-deprecating_** **instead of** **_self-depreciating_** **: Stage 5** The oldest meaning of _deprecate_ is to “pray for deliverance from,” which makes the notion of being “self-deprecating” pretty hilarious, or, as Garner puts it, “a virtual impossibility, except perhaps for those suffering from extreme neuroses.” And yet over time, this word has taken on the meaning of that slightly longer word that looks so much like it: _depreciate_ means to belittle, to lessen the value of. These days someone might even try to correct you if, in an attempt to note someone was being (overly) humble, you said they were self-depreciating. Did this just happen because the shorter word is easier to say? Partly, Garner says. Then again that makes little sense when trying to account for why people use the less-standard _preventative_ instead of _preventive_ or _irregardless_ instead of _regardless,_ he notes. Some linguists would argue that there’s no point fighting against slips like that—that language is forever unfixed and deviations should simply be observed and even appreciated—or that it’s silliness to tell people to follow rules that are as arbitrary as the meaning assigned to a certain jumble of letters. But Garner is not one of them. “There are a lot of people who mistakenly think intelligibility is the standard. ‘Oh, you knew what I was saying.’ Well, that’s not the standard. That’s a really bottom-of-the-barrel standard,” he says. “People who are concerned with English usage usually want to have their words taken seriously, either as writers or as speakers. And if you don’t use the language very well, then it hard to have people take your ideas seriously. That’s just the reality.” _The_ [_fourth edition_](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0190491485/ref=pd%5Flpo%5Fsbs%5Fdp%5Fss%5F1?pf%5Frd%5Fp=1944687642&pf%5Frd%5Fs=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf%5Frd%5Ft=201&pf%5Frd%5Fi=0195382757&pf%5Frd%5Fm=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf%5Frd%5Fr=1TN0FFRX1HJNXWCD3QQH "undefined") _of_ Garner’s Modern English Usage _was released on April 8, 2016, by Oxford University Press._ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4293303/garner-common-words-mistakes/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4293303/garner-common-words-mistakes/"},"headline":"5 Words You Use All the Time That Were Once Totally Unacceptable","datePublished":"2016-04-14T20:31:44.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T07:31:37.111Z","description":"Like bring-tears-to-an-English-teacher's-eye unacceptable","url":"https://time.com/4293303/garner-common-words-mistakes/","keywords":["Living","Newsfeed","language","Words","English"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0cd887450bc441ff/69888f3f428a9e4888cd23d1/dictionary.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Katy Steinmetz","jobTitle":"","url":"https://time.com/author/katy-steinmetz/"}],"articleSection":"","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0cd887450bc441ff/69888f3f428a9e4888cd23d1/dictionary.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"121330338","caption":"","creditText":"Courtesy of Oxford University Press","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-living/","name":"Living"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4293303/garner-common-words-mistakes/","name":"5 Words You Use All the Time That Were Once Totally Unacceptable"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Do You Know These SAT Words?","description":"MONEY staffers sat down and tried to guess. Some got it right. Some...not so much.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/2mc1HLdf/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2016-02-16T22:19:24.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/2mc1HLdf.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/4293303/garner-common-words-mistakes/","duration":"PT2M40S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/4293303/garner-common-words-mistakes/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```