Homonymy: The Spelling Monster

Earlier this week when flipping through a standard 6 pupils report form I came across something that shocked me in some way, something poorer than the pupils performance; the teacher of English who also happened to be the class teacher had noted, “David you need to pay more effort expesially in science!” If you haven’t noted the mistake in the sentence I suggest you either restart reading or just quit! I understood why our English is terrible. If a teacher could make as a grave mistake as that one, how many others has he transmitted to you. Apart from mother tongue interference, there’s one other monster in written language: homonymy. Homonymy consists of two: homographs which refers to words that are spelt the same but have different meanings and the notorious homophones! Like the suffix phone suggests, homophones have to do with talking, hearing and listening just like in telephone. These are words that sound the same or almost the same, more often the latter than the former. This is a nightmare for many non-native speakers of the English language. Here are a few of the most tricky pairs:

1.       Hear/here: one of them being among the 5 senses, mistaking the two is unforgivable. Can you hear me? Come over here! I don’t think I should explain what each means but can please show that you know the difference in your writing.

2.       Heard/had: we aren’t done with hear yet. You heard me, didn’t you? Here comes hear reincarnated in its past form. Heard is the past of hear while had is the past tense and participle of have. Again, show you know this in your writing.

3.       Definitely/Definately: the former is the correct while the latter is the misspelt form!

4.       Sight/site: site has everything to do with seeing (5 senses again) while site refers to physical location or website. What happens when it comes to writing that you suddenly decide they are interchangeable?

5.       Its/it’s: which is the possessive and which is the contraction of it is? Ask any grammar teacher how many time they have had to repeat this in class. Its is the possessive to mean belonging to something.

6.       There/their: their parents were there/there parents were there? A mistake one shouldn't be forgiven for!

7.       Principal/principle: their principal emphasized on the principle of generosity. This is one of the most mischievous, always putting to test one’s spelling. I think my example is clear enough to distinguish one from the other.

8.       Lose/loose: loose is what happens to your jeans when you lose a lot of weight. I am sure you know this but somehow you’ll always make this mistake once you put pen to paper!

9.       Breathe/breath: doing some work that you want to be error free and then find you have to use one of the two things get bumpy. To make matters worse you don’t have a dictionary to help you distinguish which is the verb and which is the noun. Paraphrasing won’t help. Worry no more, just master that the verb has an e at the end, so that if you breathe you have taken a breath! J

10.   Too/two/to: need I say anything about these?

right, rite or write?

I just listed ten, I could have listed even 50 but the list is endless. With most of these not even Microsoft grammar check will save you, if anything it might correct where you were right and give you a wrong alternative. You just have to be keen. It doesn’t understand meanings but you do. I found it somewhat pointless to keep writing the meanings because that’s not where the problem lies. And* we didn’t find a solution for our English teacher with his expesially, that wasn’t precipitated by homonymy!