In English, “see” and “look” have very similar meanings, while “oversee” and “overlook” have almost opposite meanings. I find this amusing. It’s even more amusing when it shows up on a resume like the one I saw today:
I overlooked a team of five doing blah, blah, blah…
So, did this person fail to notice a team of five that was doing a lot of important work? Or did he actually mean that he “oversaw” them? 
I also notice that we can have an insight, but not an outsight. We can have an outlook, but not an inlook. We can oversee and overlook, but we can’t undersee or underlook, unless we are perhaps undersea.
Fun Stuff
funny, homonyms, language
We all know that kids are an imperfect and often unpleasantly distorted echo of ourselves. My youngest has started echoing a tendency I seem to have of contradicting people. I used to accuse him of being a little contrarian, but now I see he’s just a chip off the old block. Read more…
Personal, Rants
grammar, language, parenting
Please stop telling me to “utilize the overhead storage” of the aircraft, or to “utilize” my user name and password.
Unless you can meaningfully distinguish between “utilize” and “use,” you should just say “use.” Personally, I can’t think of a good use of utilize without using something else: underutilize, overutilize, utilization, etc. Read more…
Rants
language, vocabulary, words