As most of us know, spell check can’t read minds. We’ve probably all ran into situations where we’ve butchered the spelling of a word and spell check has suggested a word that is not the word you mean to include. If you are tired or distracted enough, you might just accept the suggestion and move on. There isn’t much you can do about this when it happens other than catching it on a later read through or hoping your editor catches such glitches.
This post is not about that sort of spell check issue, but a much more insidious creature. I give you the bane of spell checkers everywhere … the homonym. Actually, to be more technically accurate, what we’re really talking about are homophones, but they’re are often referred to as homonyms. Confused yet? No worries. Let’s get down to it.
Here’s a quick overview.
Homophones are words that are pronounced the same but have different spellings:
- sew, so, sow
- for, fore, four
Homographs are words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations:
- bow (archery), bow (forward part of a ship)
Homonyms are words that have the same pronunciation AND the same spelling but have different meanings:
- bat
- can
The most common problem that I see associated with these words shows up in the form of homophones, and one of the most common ones that I see is heal vs. heel.
There you are just typing along, and before you know it, your character is walking into a room wearing a pair of stiletto high heals. Whoops!
And of course, spell check will glide right by this one without so much as a backward glance. As I mentioned above, there’s really not much that can be done about this other than more pairs of eyes and an editor.
The reality is that these things are just going to happen sometimes. I guess the purpose of this post is that of a little consciousness raising. Hopefully, if there is a little voice in the back of your head, it will be slightly less likely to happen.
How about you, WG2E peeps? Can you relate? Do you have any stories?
How ’bout straight from the “soul” and the “sole” of those damn big shoes?! LOL!
What’s interesting to me is that most of the time we all know the difference, but how is it that our mind, when we’re typing along, chooses the wrong one?
I’m sure there’s some psychological study of this somewhere…:-)
Thanks for the reminder, Edit Dude!!!
Yep.
Maybe you could head up a psychological study on this subject in your free time. LOL.
Those are situations when we would almost always catch them if we were on our A game. I think they tend to happen when we are fatigued or just burnt out.
So true and why you need another set of eyes after writing a book and re-reading several times your mind misses these things. Thanks for the great post!
Thanks, Elizabeth!
My worst offender is form and from. Great post Matt:)
That’s a good one.
I’m guessing that’s the old typing gremlin that tends to bite us all every now and again.
I’ve known the difference between they’re, their, and there since oh…first grade or so. What I want to know is why my fingers can’t seem to type the right one on Facebook. I’m convinced it’s some mind-bending subliminal message embedded within the FB logo, because I don’t have that problem in books or even in emails. Just FB comments.
And dont’ even get me started on hear/here!
Good point, Vickie.
I don’t think you’re the only one to have that issue on fb. You may have something with that subliminal message theory. Heh.
I’d like two say that I’ve never, ever had to many problems with homophones.
Ha!
Very nice, Tamara. Touché!
Very cute!
Oh I have a funny one! And the proofreader I hired missed it but thank goodness I caught before I published it. Not a homophone but…here it is…..
It should be Victoria’s breasts… BUT what it read was Victoria’s beasts…
Thanks, Liz.
I don’t know. Depending on the type of story, beasts might work just fine, but I’m guessing it wasn’t a monster story.
I have to admit that I’m spending a lot of time looking at breasts these days. Our cows are calving and looking at the cows’ udders is one of the ways we can tell when ones are getting close to having their babies. I guess you could say I’ve been looking at the breasts of beasts.
LOL!
I just found a nice typo in my reply: “when ones.” Nice one.
Great, informative post! I really enjoy your farm pictures too…..always looking for the latest one. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Jeanne!
I goof up waive and wave, and I always have to double check when I have the word lightning because I’ve spelled it lightening too many times. My CP is great for catching that. And realty and reality. In my first ever published book my heroine worked for a reality company. (I fixed it when I got the rights back and self published. )
Hi, Stacey. Good one.
Actually, that could be a great jumping off point for a novel. I’m imagining a story about someone who works for a reality company or agency.
EXCELLENT post, Edit Dude! Loved all the replies too, especially “the BEASTS”!
My biggest offender is leaving off the “r” in “your,” as in “When spell check is not YOU friend”. My darn hand just can’t seem to type YOUR. LOL
Thanks, Jill!
Yep. I think the YOU/YOUR issue is a big one. You are not alone.
I just completed a MS Spell/Grammar check of my 125k word novel and am now in the midst of a line-by-line edit/revision of the same manuscript.
Ain’t no contest!
The computerized review missed so much stuff it makes me want to cry. But, I’ll have to admit that it DID manage to pick up some things to reduce the amount I have left to do.
There are no shortcuts!
You have to be painfully careful if you want a polished product. Nothing like good old-fashioned hard work.
I can relate to wanting to cry.
All we can do is keep our foreheads to the grindstone (or something like that). You’re right. Hard work is what does it in the end.
Good luck, Dale!
Oh homophones, how you haunt me. I’m a fast drafter. It’s when I’m the most creative, so my first drafts are a true mess. No thinking about prose, or misspelled words, or any of the grammar stuff. And no doubt homophones slip by way too easily this way. Autocrit.com to the rescue. Paste in the scene or chapter and autocrit will highlight every word that is a homophone. Perfect way to double check the correct spelling is used.
Most of my stories are just from little typos that changed the entire meaning of the sentence – talking about there being starts overhead, instead of stars, or people wearing clocks … that sort of thing.
However, there’s a Twitter account called Stealth Mountain which exists purely to correct people when they say ‘sneak peak’ instead of ‘sneak peek’. That is literally all it ever does. Obviously, the name Stealth Mountain is a play on that.
Excellent post, Edit Dude (I was tempted to say “Edie” for ED, but thought that might be confusing)!
One of the other problems for spell-check is not catching word omissions. I think those may tend to happen to those of us who type quickly more often, but I’ve never seen a study of that. For example, someone might type, “I went for walk” instead of “I went for a walk” and the spellchecker won’t mind.
The homographs are a real challenge for text-to-speech (which I use frequently). Which one is the correct pronunciation is based on context, and that’s a challenge for software. The famous example is getting TTS to properly pronounce “The cat with nine lives lives on this street.”
Oh, and on the breasts/beasts issue: many of us may remember cartoons where the character tries to calm down a wild animal with music (as Ringo does in Help, by the way) because “Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.” The actual line from Cosgrove is “Music hath charms to sooth the savage breast.”
One final point which I just had yesterday. I was coming back from a vacation, and ended up having to blog on my cellphone in the airport. I refer to the $79/$109 Kindle as a “Mindle”, and my readers know that. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch that the autocorrect had changed “Mindles” into “Mindless”…
I’m still learning from you, but I’m making my way to the top as well. I certainly liked reading all that is posted on your blog.Keep the information coming. I loved it!