These days, as part of my work, I read a lot of essays written by people from a non-English speaking background. Some of it’s very good, some of it’s very bad, most of it’s plain average to tell you the truth.
Sometimes it can be entertaining. Spelling mistakes can always be a source of humour. For example if someone writes goblinisation instead of globalisation that always makes me chuckle. Once someone wrote In China, from ancient until now, many Chinese have been influenced by Confusion ideas and I smiled for days.
Probably the most common spelling mistake I come across is people writing quite instead of quiet, or vice versa. It’s a very understandable mistake – all it involves is switching the last two letters of the word around. But as far as spelling errors go, it’s actually quite annoying.
The main problem is that they are totally different words used in completely different ways. So when one is used instead of the other, the affect on how we read the sentence is quiet significant. As you can see from that example, the sentence now makes no sense whatsoever. When I’m reading an essay, this in not a good sign.
Of course, quiet is an adjective and is the opposite of loud. That’s pretty much all it means. Quite is another story entirely. It’s an adverb, is extremely common, and is used to grade adjectives. There can be variations in the meaning, depending on the context.
In formal British English, it can mean completely:
That opera was quite amazing = That opera was completely amazing.
In the negative quite is commonly used to mean not exactly:
That’s not quite what I meant = That’s not exactly what I meant.
The word is can also be used to imply that something is good, but it’s not the best, or it could be better:
That hamburger was quite nice = I liked the hamburger but it wasn’t the best one I’ve ever had.
This is probably the most common use of quite. Australians, particularly, use quite as part of their idiom when praising something or giving someone a compliment. In Australian English, quite can be used as a synonym for very. If I went and picked up my girlfriend on Friday night and she was wearing a new dress, I might say:
That’s quite a nice dress, is it new?
Why do Australians do this? My theory is that we know it’s important to give people praise people, but we don’t want people’s egos to get too big when we give them compliments. But please don’t tell my girlfriend that, though, or I’ll get in quite a lot of trouble the next time I say it.
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