Happy Thanksgiving. I hope everyone is having a relaxing holiday. Today I want to give you three entries from the Dictionary of Confusable Words.

1) edible/eatable. What is edible is fit for human consumption {edible mushrooms}. What is eatable is at least minimally palatable {the muffins are somewhat burned though still eatable}.

2) decimate. This word literally means “to kill every tenth person,” a means of repression that goes back to Roman times. But the word has come to mean “to inflict heavy casualties,” and that use is accepted. Less accepted is the further extension to mean “to inflict heavy damage.” Avoid decimate (1) when you are referring to complete destruction or (2) when a percentage is specified. That is, don’t say that a city was “completely decimated,” and don’t say that some natural disaster “decimated 23 percent of the city’s population.”

3)adduce; deduce; induce. To adduce is to give as a reason, offer as a proof, or cite as an example {as evidence of reliability, she adduced her four years of steady volunteer work as a nurse’s aide}. Deduce and induce are opposite processes. To deduce is to reason from general principles to specific conclusions, or to draw a specific conclusion from general bases {from these clues, one deduces that the butler did it}. To induce is to form a general principle based on specific observations {after years of studying ravens, the researchers induced a few of their social habits}.

I will post more entries in the future, if you have a specific question for the Dictionary of Confusable Words feel free to send an email or leave a comment.