me or my going: Erroneous combinations sometimes used by persons careless with their diction. Do not say “Instead of me (or my) going to London I went to Bermuda”; say, rather, “Instead of going....” Here “me” and “my” are redundant.
merely: Sometimes misused for simply. Merely implies no addition; simply, no admixture or complication; e. g., “The boys were there merely as spectators; it is simply incredible that they should have so disgraced themselves”; “It is simply water.”
midst: The Standard Dictionary has the following: “In our, your, or their midst, in the midst of us, you, or them: a form pronounced analogically irreproachable by Fitzedward Hall, in Modern English p. 50, but objected to by some authorities.” Dr. William Mathews is one of these. In his work on “Words: their Use and Abuse,” he asks “Would any one say ‘In our middle?’... The possessive pronoun can properly be used only to indicate possession or appurtenance.”
mighty used as a synonym for very, exceedingly, or extraordinarily is colloquial but borders on the vulgar. “Mighty fine,” “A mighty shame,” “Mighty doubtful” are phrases to be avoided.
misspell: Do not write this word mispell. Its component parts are mis + spell, and it retains the double s.
mistakable: Although formerly correctly mistakeable this word does not now retain the “e” after the “k”—an evidence of spelling reform along lines of least resistance due probably to phonology.
mistaken: Originally mistake meant “to take amiss, misconceive, or misunderstand,” and on this account some persons claim that you are mistaken means “you are misunderstood”; and that when this observation is made it expresses precisely the reverse of the meaning that the speaker desires to convey. According to them to tell a man he is mistaken, that is, misunderstood, is a very different thing from telling him that he mistakes or personally misunderstands.
The Standard Dictionary treating this word says: The anomalous use of mistaken has naturally attracted the attention of speech-reformers; we ought to mean, “You are misapprehended or misunderstood,” they tell us, when we say “You are mistaken,” and if we mean “You are in error,” we ought to say so. But suppose the alleged misuse of mistaken gives rise to no misunderstanding whatever—that everybody, high or low, throughout the English-speaking world, knows what is meant when one says “You are mistaken”—in that case, to let alone seems to be wisdom. The corruption, if it be one, has the sanction not only of universal employment, but of antiquity.
mitten: An obsolete substitute for glove now revived as a colloquialism in the phrase to get the mitten, that is “to get the glove with the hand withdrawn: said of a rejected suitor for a lady’s hand.” An allied phrase is to give the mitten to. None of these is used in polite society.