Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I don't normally go around correcting people, but this particular one, as I said, really bugs me, because it's not normally a typo - people are genuinely not aware that it should be "whet", perhaps because it's not a terribly common word.
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It's always funny to see, that some mistakes in a particular language are typical 'foreigners' mistakes', while others are 'native speaker's mistakes'...
In Dutch, 'to whet' is translated as 'wetten', and 'to wet' is 'nat maken'.
So, because those words are totally different to us, once we know the English translation of these verbs, we will never use 'whet' for 'wet' and vice versa...
I must say, that I often noticed that in the case of homonyms, native speakers tend to make more mistakes than people who don't have English for their primary language. ('there primary language'... I see that more often in texts written by native speakers.)
(I hope you don't find too many spelling mistakes in this post!)