Recourse - resource
From Hull AWE
Fowler (1931) lists the pair recourse and resource as an example of his category fourth group of Malaprops: "Words having properly no connexion with each other, but confused through superficial resemblance". Writers still sometimes confuse them, sometimes by mere accident: the reversal of a pair of single letters is an easy typing mistake.
- OED gives many meanings and sub-meanings for recourse. Most are obsolete, and only of interest to various forms of specialist, mostly in history. (The root is Latin words meaning 'to run back', and more loosely 'to go to'.) Two meanings are more likely to be currently important to most ordinary students. Princeton University's 'WordNet' dictionary gives these as:
- the "act of turning to for assistance; 'have recourse to the courts'; 'an appeal to his uncle was his last resort'"; and second
- "something or someone turned to for assistance or security; 'his only recourse was the police'; 'took refuge in lying' (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=recourse, accessed 28/04/08).
- Resources are the stocks needed to do something. A country's natural resources are the raw materials to be found within the boundaries, by growing, collecting, catching, quarrying or mining them, etc. The resources need in academic life are likely to be books or their equivalents: they are sometimes called learning resources, as libraries are sometimes called resource centres.
- Resourcefulness is the ability to find resources, principally in being abld to find the means of getting a job done, even when the 'proper' resources are not available. It is a form of initiative
- Fowler ends with the sentences: "You may indeed have recourse to a resource, but not vice versa. You may also resort to, which makes the confusion easier." The latter sentence is not as clear and unambiguous as he might have wished: but if you consider using the phrasal verb to resort to when you want the verb phrase 'to have recourse to', it may help.
Resources is one of the 117 mis-spellings listed as 'Common difficulties' in the section on 'Spelling' within 'Writing' in UEfAP.
