Easy to Catch an Anglophone Mangling a Homophone

My wife and I recently attended the annual Spell-a-Thon conducted by the Big Bear Valley Learn-to-Read Program and the Mountain Literacy Program at the Lake Arrowhead Hilton.

With 27% of Americans said to be illiterate, these mountain communities should be commended for promoting this spelling bee as a fund-raiser for adult literacy training.

It was not a contest of individuals competing against one another; rather, the contestants were divided into groups of three, each representing some community entity, such as Friends of the Library, Rotary, the American Assn. of University Women, middle school teachers and Soroptimists.

Any member of each group could rise to spell a word, but as soon as a word was misspelled, the group was eliminated. Each group was allowed one pass--to avoid a word they weren’t sure of.

One by one the groups went down. Strangely, they spelled some difficult words aegis , cacophonous , and missed some easy ones. One group, for example, spelled raisin r-a-i-s-o-n . Its spokesman acknowledged, before misspelling the word, that the three members had been in disagreement. They gasped when the judge said, “Incorrect.”

Others missed such easy words as committee, cemetery, and vengeance . Two groups passed on the word palette , (an artist’s paint mixing board), which might have given me some trouble. At the end, the only group left was the American Assn. of University Women, which seems to suggest that a university education helps.

Happily, no one was called upon to spell potato .

English is not an easy language, and except to an English-speaker’s ear, it is probably not a pleasant one. When it comes to mellifluence (I looked it up), no language can compare with Hawaiian, with all those lovely vowels, w’s, n’s and k’s. How did the Hawaiians develop a speech so euphonious and the Germans one so guttural?

In English there is often very little correlation between spelling and sound. I can think of several pronunciations for ough .

We have aw as in thought ; uff as in rough ; oo as in through ; ow as in plough ; off as in trough and oh as in thorough . No doubt there are others.

One expects a paper like The Times to be literate, with every word spelled correctly, and in general it is. However, hardly a day goes by that one can’t find a misused homophone--that is, a word that is spelled correctly but is the wrong word.

A homophone, as everyone should know, is a word that is pronounced like another, but is spelled differently and has a different meaning--for example bore and boar . (A homonym , strictly speaking, is a word that has one spelling but two or more meanings, like pitch , as in pitch black, and pitch as in wild pitch or off pitch.)

Few spelling errors are found in The Times because our computers have a spell-check which picks out and marks misspellings. Thus, if you spell stream as streem , the computer will mark it, since there is no word spelled streem .

However, the computer is blind to an incorrectly used homophone; it may be the wrong word, but it is not misspelled, and the computer is not smart enough to know that the writer intended bore not boar .

Perhaps many of today’s journalists misuse homophones because their education was acquired largely by sound, not by sight. They think that a word is right by its sound alone.

With the help of some vigilant readers, I have found many misused homophones in the pages of this newspaper, of which the following are a few:

“She bares no malice.” “His books have peaked an interest. . . .” This from a Times education writer: “Three- tired system of education . . . “ (not quite a homophone since it is not pronounced the same as the wanted word). “Our schools graduate hoards of illiterates” (Too true.) “Women in midriff- bearing tops. . . . “ “The big screen where Gable shined .” (Not a homophone but the wrong word.) “Testing electronic censors . . . . “ (Certainly censors ought to be tested.) “The site of so many people. . . . “ “She made her husband tow the line.” “The line was drawn taught .” “He poured over his book.” (Poured what over it?) “I’m going to ring your neck.”

I would bet that at least one erroneous homophone can be found in every edition. The site of so many hapless solecisms makes me want to ring somebody’s neck. Site! Ring! (I’ll bet those two erroneous words get through because the computer is too dumb to know the difference.) I would like to feel superior to all this bumbling, but I have to confess that a few years ago I wrote that “the sun shined down on the Ojai Valley.”

Well, anyway, I can spell potato.

But I had to look up palette .