I guess that any narrator of a poem by E. A. Poe would have much reason to exercise caution. Dangers lurk in unexpected places. The world is dark, murky, and not at all as it seems.
Today, I was listening to a financial commentary on a reputable cable channel. The speaker used the word weary to mean wary/leery. Something made him quite "weary." It made me chuckle. He actually seemed quite agitated! The people on the panel with him didn't appear to react at all. It made me wonder if they understood the word just as he intended it. That made me worry.
I usually cut people a lot of slack in their spoken language, but I hear this mistake so much, I have become weary of it in BOTH senses of the word.
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.[edit: added the following]
To demonstrate how widespread this error has become, I link you to this NY Times online article:
Be Wary of the Master
The title in the heading is: Be Wary of the Master
The title in the browser tab is: Be Wary of the Yoga Master
The title in the path of the url address is: be-weary-of-the-yoga-master
In my experience, such differences are the result of editorial changes after posting. I see this as evidence that at some time late in the game, a NY Time writer had weary where wary was warranted.
I've seen and heard that too, and I'm getting weary of editorial "fixes" that break otherwise correct writing.
Reminds me of the time one of my editors changed "further" to "farther." Although the two terms are often used interchangeably these days, I explained to him how my choice of "further" was based on the distinction between "beyond" (in general) and "physical distance." He said he was amazed he didn't know that, what with a Masters in Journalism, three published books, and many years experience as an editor. Just goes to show you there's always things to learn about language. Even your own language.
BTW … I'm not much a fan of poetry, but I do enjoy Poe's writing. Maybe because it actually rhymes and sticks to a constant meter.
Heimhenge, I'm with you. I accept that I'm a Philistine in such matters, or maybe just a crusty old curmudgeon, but it isn't obvious to me how most of what is styled "poetry" these days isn't, simply, prose. It's intended to be beautiful and moving prose, surely, but that by itself doesn't make it poetry.
Don't get me wrong, I LIKE the works of Billy Collins. But simply writing well and then cutting up your writing into shorter lines...I don't see how that makes it poetry.
Me, I like traditional poetry with meter at least and usually rhyme as well. That includes Poe and Kipling, for sure, plus much of what I find in Tolkein. And I finally got the feel of iambic pentameter (it happened when I first encountered Ozymandias), so I can include that too. Otherwise, spare me...with a few exceptions such as Billy Collins.
On "farther" and "further"; yes, they're interchangeable (at least in the US), but I've heard it said that if there's a rule at all, "farther" is for physical distance and "further" for other more metaphorical distances. I read further in the book, or make further progress in my thinking, as my car gets farther down the road; that sort of thing. The reason I mention it here is that in the books I read by British authors, this rule seems to be reversed. Has anyone else noticed this?
Doesn't reading a book involve physical distance? (Number of words, paragraphs, pages, chapters.) It can be literally measured.
Good point Dick. Here's some other measures that could easily be interpreted as a "distance" of sorts. How about "farther into the future" or "farther into the positive integers" or "farther into depression." They all sound right to me.
It's probably due to borderlines like these, that farther and further are becoming interchangeable (at least in the US, as Bob notes). The online dictionary I use has the two words defined as essentially synonyms.