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The Grumpy Grammarian

As mentioned in the first installment, the omission, insertion, substitution, or transposition of letters may form unintended words that will breeze right by spell-check (because they are in its dictionary), but other errors that spell-check blithely overlooks can be more embarrassing – or amusing, depending on one's viewpoint.

Most of us are aware that English abounds in homophones, words that sound alike but are often entirely different in meaning.  Spell-check can't (cant) read (reed) for sense (scents), so it will accept all of these words.  We may not realize how many there are –probably hundreds of them:  brake/break, see/sea, flu/flew, sell/cell, wood/would, die/dye (or died/dyed), rose/rows (or rouse/rows), dear/deer, through/threw, coarse/course, missed/mist, new/knew, no/know, ball/bawl, all/awl, great/grate, shore/sure, sale/sail, phase/faze, to name just a few.  There are "triple-headers" such as site/cite/sight, rain/rein/reign, pair/pear/pare, meet/meat/mete, sense/scents/cents, I/aye/eye, and write/rite/right.

Some words do not sound exactly alike but are enough alike to be easily confused, such as accept/except, defuse/diffuse, and affect/effect.  Even where/were give some students trouble.  Finally, there are those words that sound exactly alike in some meanings and only somewhat alike in others.  An example of an especially troublesome pair is desert (to abandon), dessert (the last course of a meal), and desert (an arid land).  The first two sound alike; the last is pronounced differently.

Deep troubles – and potential embarrassment – result from the use of words and phrases that we're unsure of or that we have heard but misinterpreted.  If the words are spelled correctly, spell-check won't blink.  Here we enter the realm of the malaprop and the mondegreen (also known as the "egg corn"), discussed and defined in the September 2006 issue of "The Grumpy Grammarian."

Common confusions are:  referring to the prostate gland as the the prostrate; writing "could of," "should of," "would of" instead of "could have," "should have," "would have"; writing "maybe" instead of "may be," and vice versa.  A desert island is likely to become a dessert island (though perhaps that's only on sundaes).  We may have abdominal snowmen and abominable pain; some people apparently eat cold slaw instead of cole slaw, while others use a wrist broom instead of a whisk broom; and there's the classic example of the kid who said his grandma had "very close veins" instead of "varicose veins." 

In the hands of students, phrases can take curious turns.  "All intensive purposes" is a common rendition of "all intents and purposes," and the idiom "beck and call" becomes "beckoned call."  Instead of "toe the line," we get "tow the line," though I've yet to see "tow the lion," which produces a more interesting image.  Two things that are very close are described as being separated by "a hare's breath" instead of "a hair's breadth," though anyone should realize that the breath of a rabbit can't possibly have anything to do with distance.  The difficulty often is that the user of the phrase has no awareness of its real root or meaning and is just repeating what has been heard – or, more precisely, misheard.

Some students' phrasal creations may be once-in-a-lifetime malaprops or mondegreens, though I've certainly seen references to "drug attics" more than once.  One of my favorites is "standard eyes test," and another is the description of angry drivers who "make rude jesters with their hands."  I've also read about schools that "signal out" some students for special treatment, people who "tote their own horns," someone who "studded his growth" by smoking, a young man who was a "ship off the old block," and people who order "on trays" at restaurants.

The intentional play on similar words is, in fact, the source of much humor.  That is, of course, what a pun is.  We consider people who do this skillfully to be rather clever.  The unintentional misuse of similar words, however, has the opposite effect.  The difference between an intentional play on words and unintentional misuse of them is the difference between a wit and a twit.  If we want to be laughed with and not laughed at, we'll want to be sure that our gags don't come across as goofs.

I don't intend to deny the usefulness of spell-check.  I have it turned on all the time to catch my typos.*  I learned the hard way to have my e-mail program automatically check my outgoing mail for spelling mistakes before I send it.  Before I did that, I sent to all employees in the company where I worked a memo that misspelled the company name; since I was the resident editor and writing critic, I was immediately swamped with replies pointing out my mistake.  Nevertheless, spell-check is no substitute for proofreading, and its existence doesn't mean that we can forgo learning how to spell.

*Clarification:  When I enter something on this website (as with most websites), I do not have the luxury of running spell-check "on the fly."  I can run posts through a spelling program, but I often forget – and it has even more limitations than Word's spell-check does.  Consequently, I've made some embarrassing blunders.  In a way, I'm grateful for that.  It's a constant reminder that I need to be very careful and a source of gratitude that, very early in life, I was taught how to spell.