I always thought discreet was just a different way of spelling discrete, used by the same type of person who’d write wierd instead of weird, but apparently discreet and discrete are “supposed to” mean different things, a “discrete quantity” vs “discreet packaging”.
I reject this notion and will continue to spell either sense as discrete. Both are from Old French discret, both are pronounced the same, both were spelled the same in Middle English, and discretion is still spelled the same for either meaning, so there is absolutely no reason why discrete and discreet should be spelled differently, other than to personally confuse me. There are enough people who confuse the two spellings as to make the written distinction between discrete and discreet absolutely useless.
Yes, I’m going to intentionally misspell a word because it annoys me. You should do the same for any words that you dislike the spellings of. Who’s gonna stop us‽
personally i bully the english language and its idiosyncrasies the other way around; i embrace its oddly spelled words and pronounce them exactly as they should be. for instance, at my job i sometimes write pseudocode, and then have a great time telling people about my ‘p-sh-you-doo-code’ and seeing how many men in the office i can make try to explain my own degree to me (it works depressingly frequently).
so yeah, as far as i’m concerned those are two different words: discreet and discrettay