I have finally stopped buying aspirational groceries.

Grimer Girl here.

I'm Minyon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules and other cool stuff.

This week we'll look at the difference between two lofty words and then we'll talk about

some interesting problems with tools like ChatGPT.

A listener named Christy asked this question, quote,

can you explain the difference between inspirational and aspirational?

I started hearing people use the word aspirational where I thought inspirational would work.

From context, they seemed the same to me and when I looked at the difference I still couldn't

really figure out how I'd use them differently.

Thanks Christy.

This question caught my eye because I still remember the first time I heard the word aspirational

because it seemed new to me.

I was in New York, meaning with my publisher for the first time, which would have been about 16 years ago now.

And while he was explaining things to me about the publishing industry, books about arts and crafts came up.

He said books about projects like working with stained glass or even writing a novel were aspirational

in that people want to do these things, but most people never actually do the things described in the books.

They simply aspire to do them.

There's an older definition of aspirational that goes back to the late 1800s and means it's something like having aspirations.

Here's an example from a 2012 Harvard Business Review interview about looking for a job.

The interviewer asks how much of a job search should be, quote, dreaming and inspiring and sort of spreading your wings.

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