Confusable Words (2)

Here are two that sometimes get mixed up in student papers.

statute / statue — If you want to talk about a law or organizational rule, you might use statute as a synonym. Statue, on the other hand, refers to a large sculpture of a person or animal, the Statue of Liberty, for instance. The Code of Hammurabi was engraved in stone, but it was not a statue. Too bad, because then we might have been able to talk about a statue of statutes.

tenet / tenant — It is possible to talk about the main tenets of Marxism, that is, its main principles or beliefs. Talking about Marxism’s tenants, however, does not make much sense. Now if Marx had owned any property, perhaps he could have played the landlord and collected rent from his tenants.

Confusion about these words might also result from too much reliance on the computer for spell-checking. After all, a computer cannot tell if you are using the right word or not. It only knows if the word you use exists with that spelling in its dictionary.