Well, I don’t really have a fear of homophones: My pet peeve is their incorrect usage. These are words that have the same pronunciation, but are spelt differently and have different meanings. The sentence context and syllabic stress should make the correct choice of word obvious, but, regrettably, we often see silly trade outs between similar sounding pairings such as “compliment” and “complement” or “affect” and “effect”.
I’ve recently come across the following homophones being inadvertently swopped: “palette” vs. “palate”, where colour and taste got confused in the mix, and, more humorously: “barristers” in lieu of “baristas”… although I’m sure that legal beagles are so hyped up on caffeine that they would no doubt judge themselves to be expert coffee brewers.
A recent verbatim comment seen on facebook:
“I can’t stand people that don’t know the difference between your and you’re. There so stupid.” [sic][or maybe that should be “sick”?]
The last sentence of the quoted entry is a beautiful example of Muphry’s Law – which is an adage stating that “if you write anything criticising editing (or proofreading), there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written”. The name is a deliberate misspelling of Murphy’s Law.
For a comprehensive alphabetical list of homophones, visit: www.homophones.com
Which pairings do you love to loathe?
Footnote:
Then there are homonyms (words having the same spelling and pronunciation, but different meanings) such as “lying”, or “watch” and “play” – where different meanings are deduced according to whether the word is used as a noun or a verb, and homographs (words having the same spelling, but different pronunciations and meanings) e.g wind / wound / present.
