Some of my best friends are homophones

[gwyn]

I saw this today in IMDB's news section, and it made me laugh:
Reports the punk legend Johnny Ramone is dying of prostrate cancer have been wildly exaggerated - according to his wife Lydia.

So apparently there are rumors that Johnny has cancer from lying down, or something. The word they wanted, of course, was prostate. Which led me to think about what to post usage-wise, and then I remembered that I've been hanging on to my own personal peeve for a really long time, and haven't addressed it in favor of other more confusing issues. There's really not a good way to overcome homophone/homonym abuse, to be honest, other than developing a good eye and spelling/word skills. It's an especially thorny issue to address, because there are so many words and problems with words that fall under this rubric that I almost don't know where to start -- and assume I might end up doing this in multiple posts.

Today, I wanted to at least start with identifying the concept. A homonym is most often a word that has the same pronunciation (often spelling, too) as another, but that has a different meaning. A homophone is similar, where the words are spelled differently, but pronounced similarly -- but they mean different things. (Think medal/meddle; taught/taut; pore/pour; compliment/complement, the classic there/their/they're, your/you're; and so on ad infinitum.) There's another term often used by grammarians but that I rarely see used in casual discussion, homograph, which is not really much different from the more general term homonym, and are words spelled alike but with different meanings and usually with different pronunciations (lead, [pr. leed], meaning “to conduct,” and lead, [pr. led], the name of the metal). (And just because it's the one thing that can send me into fits of apoplexy, the past tense of the verb to lead? Is led, not lead. So there.) Most folks stick to homophone and homonym when they're talking about these words, so I will too, just for simplicity's sake. Most of you who know this stuff know it, and those of you who don't and asked me to do this would probably prefer to keep it simple, non?

So technically, my example above isn't really in this category at all -- prostrate and prostate are spelled differently, pronounced differently, and one important letter makes them entirely different words. But it still serves as a good example, just because how we hear things, and how we say things, often influences our writing far more than we may realize, and if we're not cautious, we can make some serious blunders because we may not know the difference between certain words we pick. A lot of people hear the r in prostate -- they actually don't really realize there's no r there, because the more common word they probably heard growing up (before we all started learning about men's prostate glands, ah those were the days, weren't they?) was prostrate -- "Spike has heat prostration" or "Starsky is lying prostrate on the floor because he's seriously drunk."

The problem is compounded, too, by people who either don't read much, or who read but never really notice the words they're seeing on the page. They make no connection to the word they've heard and the word as it's spelled in print, so if they don't hear the d in iced tea, they believe it's ice tea all their life. The way speech lets us ellide letter sounds into each other, or skip them altogether, means that if someone has no ability or inclination to remember how that word looks in print, they'll perpetuate some truly irritating or hilarious mistakes. Or we hear phrases or words all our lives, but we never see them in print, so we don't know what they look like (one of my favorite examples was someone who wrote "loaded for bare" which I liked thinking about for its abstract possibilities. The person had heard, but never seen written down, the expression, and didn't understand that it meant a gun with a load [bullet heavy enough] that can take out a bear). There are tons of reasons for this, but what's frustrating for readers who know their stuff is that so many people who write amateur fiction never bother to check their work, or try to learn where they're abusing H/H (because I am lazy and can't type, I'm calling homonyms and homophones H/H).

There was a story that had achieved a kind of legendary status in X-Files fandom that I never understood (the status, not the story). Not only was it, to my eyes, an incredible case of character rape for both Mulder and Scully, but the writers thought they were just the shit, and had no interest in a beta reader. So the novel was peppered with enough H/H abuse to choke a cow, and at one point I counted 12 examples on my computer screen of seriously egregious mistakes -- and that wasn't including all the their/there/they're mistakes, nor the your/you're. If they weren't outright H/H errors, they were just the writers' ideas, apparently, of phonetic spellings of words they had no idea how to spell and couldn't be bothered to spell check. My personal favorite, that I trot out at parties all the time, was "architextural drawing." Because, you know, there's a word texture, and there's a word architecture, so presumably they must be spelled the same, right? I despised this piece so much, but what really made my head go boom was that not one person I knew -- not one grammar bitch or spelling dominatrix -- was annoyed by it. They were all, oh, the story's so great, I didn't notice. And I was just boggled by this. To me, that's one of many things that makes a story bad.

Phonetic spelling like that is always dangerous, but most often, spell checkers will catch the error words that have no corresponding real word, so if we use them we can be alerted to some of the more obvious troubles. Spell checkers, however, will not catch true H/H problems. It won't know that you want the word grate in there, not great, or which of the there/their/they'res you need. I love the little Webster's Pocket Dictionary for this reason -- it's tiny so takes up little space, and it lists how to spell words, but best of all, it gives you the other problem words if there is confusion. So the listing for compliment gives you the spelling, and then notes that this word means a comment of praise, but complement means something that enhances something else. A lot of these problems can easily be fixed with a quick consult of a reference; the problem is that many people may not know they need a reference.

And that's the tricky part, because fan writing is a culture nowadays of not saying anything critical to anyone because so few people can take constructive crit. So folks just plow on writing sentences like "The grate thing about life at Hogwarts was that Harry new he was'nt a lone and their were other wizards near-bye." And sadly, most people will continue to read them and not understand that this is wrong; the people who know this will be off beta-reading for the really standout authors.

So now that I've defined the concept, next time I'll try to get into some of the most common mistakes and trickiest distinctions. I think that will be a long post. In the meantime, just remember that led is the past tense of to lead (as in "Wes didn't know how to lead Faith on the path to righteousness" but "Buffy led Spike down the garden path"), and it sounds just like lead, the metal. It may not get you very far, but I will love you.

Comments

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

I've always seen it instructed as think, but because of the way we talk, most people hear thing -- so it's kind of morphed into "that's how I heard it growing up." Someone once told me about the phrase "used to" and the (I'm sure very valid, but I didn't care) reason it's supposed to be use to. I didn't care enough to change my way of using it, when the whole world seems to employ the phrase the way I do, so I think people are safe with whichever they choose.