Our friend the fisherman—not to be confused with Fisherman's FriendTM, the frightfully flavored yet oddly effective throat lozenge—had confused the words eerie and leery. It's easy to do. The words rhyme, and they both have a sense of foreboding about them. However, it's unlikely that many people would intentionally describe themselves as eerie. The word eerie actually means "strange and frightening." The word leery, however, means "cautious or wary" and would have been the better choice to describe the would-be fisherman's feelings.
One way to keep these words straight is to think about them as "inside-out." Leery is how we would feel inside if we saw or heard something eerie outside.
Because leery is synonymous with wary, it's worth mentioning that this latter word is sometimes confused with weary. While wary is defined as "cautious about possible dangers or problems," weary just means "tired."
If the right circumstances aligned, it would actually be possible to use all four of these words in a single sentence:
Weary from a long drive and wary about driving at night, we found an eerie-looking hotel that made us a little leery about checking in.
Hmm... isn't that the way every episode of Scooby Doo began?
[Download the entire episode here.]
Source: The Oxford Dictionary of Current English.
Songs from this Episode: "Red Right Hand" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds; "Fisherman's Blues" by The Waterboys; "Mi Basta Chiudere Gli Occhi E" by Nino Rota; "Cemetry Gates" by The Smiths.
About Grammar Grater
Grammar Grater is a weekly podcast from Minnesota Public Radio that looks at English words, grammar and usage in a time when everybody's a writer. And with the global nature of communication, there's not a single style guide everyone uses. Each week, host Luke Taylor and the Grammatis Personae Players (Cory Busse, Amy Ault and John Ryan) take a lighthearted approach to language by putting common linguistic bugbears through the Grammar Grater.
You can learn more about the podcast here and you can subscribe to the podcast by clicking this link: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/tools/podcasts/grammar_grater.xml
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Comments: 11
Say it isn't so, GG.
Almost no one uses "leery" anymore, which is a shame. It's a very descriptive word. I imagine someone slinking around corners, hesitant of everything. It's a good word for a cat that wants to be petted but isn't quite convinced to come to you when you call it.
If, however, there were three or four of them, I may have then written a couple of fishermen, using the informal meaning of couple as "an indefinite small number."
Hope that's helpful. Again, great point and thanks for the comments!
So the good news is if some people say "couple" and others say "couple of"…well, to use another idiomatic phrase, "it's all good."
Thanks for the discussion!
You're right though that "couple of" is an idiom. But it's only recently that "couple" has become idiomatic where "couple of" used to be used. My ear is still back about twenty years, though. In ten years it'll be back thirty years.