Wednesday, February 07, 2018

It's not a house, it's a dwelling


I briefly studied English as a university undergraduate. One of the reasons why I changed out of the subject a few weeks into the semester was that I didn't like the lecturer. He once spent an entire lecture talking about phrases used in real estate advertisements. This doesn't bother me so much, as the spelling errors they often contain. What is a "sort after location?" Granted, there are many homonyms in the English language, but it is not difficult to tell the difference between sort and sought.

In the context of this sentence, sort makes no sense at all. If a location is sought after, it means that the location is very popular with prospective home buyers. If it is sort after, perhaps the copywriter means that a homeowner will sort through their personal effects after they move into their new home, so they will "sort after location."

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