Oh! The shame...

In the grammar and vocabulary stakes, I award myself a B+. I have taught English to many young people and still take pleasure in explaining away an errant apostrophe to willing students of any age - and will merrily trap unwilling students with a complicated and trademarked Superglue manoeuvre. I know the basics like I know the back of my large, yet perfectly proportioned, hand.

However, I will reluctantly concede that there are substantial gaps in my knowledge, hence my decision to deny myself the coveted A-. I still struggle with fewer vs. less and I've only recently worked out how to remember the difference between stationery and stationary. One of my proudest moments was beating an 11 year old at Scrabble by using all my tiles to play the word 'quixotic' on a triple word score. Fortunately my opponent didn't believe the word existed, so I was able to look it up in the dictionary for her, cleverly disguising the fact that I didn't know what it meant. Just this morning I was compelled to research 'febrile' and found its definition to be utterly different than I'd expected.

The blush this raised, however, was as nothing to the flush of humiliation I experienced yesterday when I found a magnificient website that details hundreds of common grammar and spelling confusions. At first glance, it was a Mecca of smugness for me as I ticked off the ones I knew already. But it wasn't long before I spied a phrase that sent a shiver of horror through my marrow: bated breath. I have spent the past few years thinking this was spelled baited breath and wondering if there were a more repellent combination of adjective and noun in our beloved language. I made just that point in an email only last week, commenting on the fact that the two words, when employed consecutively, conjure up images of maggots and tongues and should be avoided on this basis. However, as soon as I saw 'bated breath', sans 'i', on the aforelinked website, I knew I'd made an error. And sure enough, one click took me to a new page where my mistake was verified: "Although the odor of the chocolate truffle you just ate may be irresistible bait to your beloved, the proper expression is 'bated breath.' 'Bated' here means 'held, abated.' You do something with bated breath when you’re so tense you’re holding your breath."

I've tried to make myself feel better by focussing on the fact that the inverted commas at the end of the first and second quoted sentences should be within the full stops, but it's no use: I have made an humiliating error and I shall not forgive myself until lunchtime tomorrow at the absolute earliest.