Homophone Challenged

That is homophone, not homophobe, you silly goose.

On the off chance that you do not know what a homophone is and did not parse out the Greek – homo meaning same, phone meaning voice or utterance – here is the dictionary definition:

One of two or more words pronounced alike but different in meaning or derivation or spelling (such as the words to, too, and two)

Common examples of homophones include:

• • • berry – bury
    • bread – bred
    • lead  – led
    • cell – sell
    • sent – scent – cent
    • flex – flecks
    •  weather-whether
    • guessed-guest
    • band – banned
    • and many, many more

I do not recall having an issue with homophones in college when I wrote papers. Nor do I recall this challenging me with the occasional report and many letters I would write with the Arkansas Department of Health.

I changed careers into Information Technology thinking I could sit in a corner, gnaw on programming bones, and just write code all day long. Wrong.  At its core, IT is about helping people do their job.  This meant that I needed to interact with the users of various computer systems I supported. It meant I needed to dig out exactly what users wanted when they said they wanted a report for xyz or they wanted a screen to do abc. As my IT career progressed from programmer, to programmer analyst to finally systems analyst, I was writing more and more. Of course, this included lots of emails, but also included drafts of user requirements, explanation of issues to vendors, user manuals, documentation, proposals for modifications and various other sundry documents of corporate existence.  Fortunately for my sanity, they still allowed me to write code, which was what I really liked to do, if for no other reason than I was very good at it.

Now with this silly little blog, I am still writing, it being one of my too many hobbies. Truthfully, part of me wishes I could stop sending these missives into the black hole of cyberspace, but writing is a bit of a compulsion for me. I wonder if there is a Bloggers Anonymous…  Perhaps they meet next door to Ellipsis Anonymous…

I stray.  I started noticing about 20 or so years ago that I was having trouble in my writing with homophones.  A recent one was when I wrote lead when I meant to write led.  Trouble is that when I reread to edit, I frequently miss them, even reading out loud.  It drives me absolutely bonkers when I discover I have made this type of error. This especially bothered me in my business writings. It always struck me as looking very unprofessional.

But then again I have several other little writing faux pas.  I tend to stutter on the, often writing it twice in a row.  Luckily, if I am writing in Word, the grammar checker will catch that one for me. I sometimes wonder if that is a bit of a holdover from my childhood stutter/stammering problem. Who knows? Boy how I hated it when they would take me out of class to go to the speech therapist. Damn, I strayed again.

I also frequently leave out the little words: a, an, to, for,  etc.  I all to often leave the “y” off of they so that it becomes the. That one is a head scratcher. Again when I edit, I read out loud, I will read the words even though they are not on the screen or paper.  The mind is such a strange piece of machinery.

No real point to all this, except I reread a posted article and several of these stupid little errors were in it.  I promise you that I really once did have a mind that worked reasonably well. Once or twice in my life people have actually called me smart… and ass was not attached to the utterance.

And so it goes.

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