Homophonia - by Debbie Bennett

Here’s a thing – a spellcheck is not a dictionary. It can tell you if the word you have written is correctly spelled, but what if that wasn’t the word you wanted in the first place? What good is a perfect word in the wrong surroundings?

Writers rely far too much on spellcheck in my opinion. There are the obvious too/two/to and their/there/they’re mix-ups.  Its/it’s and your/you’re. Spellcheck is never going to tell you you’ve used the wrong one and it’s an easy mistake to make when your fingers are hitting the keyboard in an inspirational frenzy. But that’s when editing becomes important, when sometimes just changing the font or the type size moves the text around on the screen and you stop seeing what you think is there and start reading the actual words you wrote.

I read the sample of an ebook on Amazon a while back. I can’t remember what it was, but I didn’t get past the first paragraph because of the hoards of people. Yes – hoards of people – can you imagine them all stuffed away in cupboards and spilling out at every opportunity? How very messy. Obviously the writer meant hordes of people, ran a spellcheck (or not) and thought there was no problem. Now I’m typing this in Word and already hoards is double-underlined in blue. Word frequently doesn’t get my writing – and I often ignore its little hints, but I always look. Because maybe, it just might be right once in a while …

I’ve just read another book. This one has our heroine studying her hero and contemplating his taught muscles. Clearly, the hero has been giving his body lessons in deportment, but I’m pretty sure the writer meant taut muscles. Or else I missed the point of the scene completely.

A character reigning in their emotions, or passions, or whatever is another classic homophone I see regularly, as if royalty have the prerogative in self-restraint. I’ve lost track of the number of characters who ask their friends to bare with them, and I eagerly await their imminent nudity, but it never happens.

And I’m sorry, but words are a writer’s tools – and if you can’t master them, you have lost my custom. If my plumber has the wrong size spanner, I’m not going to pay him to do the job just because he has a nice sign-written van and smart overalls. And if a writer can’t use words correctly, then why bother at all?

Here’s a list of common homophones. My person pet hates are numbers 84 and 97 – and of course, the classic misunderstandings of the words elicit/illicit and affect/effect, which the purists might say aren’t true homophones anyway, since there are subtle differences in pronunciation. But I’m a pedant so I'll stick to the rules, thank you.

And finally, here’s a classic: An advert I saw today for a 4-birth caravan! An extension to the maternity wing, perhaps?