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One of my many flaws as a writer became painfully
apparent a week ago. Where I should have written
pedaling,
instead I wrote peddling.
This
error somehow slipped past the copy editors at the Post --
who are usually adept at catching my mistakes before they
appear in print.
For those of you who inquired, I wish to point out that
I do know the difference between what Lance Armstrong
does
and what the Fuller Brush salesman
does.
This wasn't my first difficulty with homophones -- words that sound the same but have a different spelling and meaning.
Earlier this year, in another publication, I wrote about
a bridal trail
near a national park; of course it
was a bridle trail.
The most embarrassing, back when I worked for the local
paper, was when I got the winner of a Soil Conservation
Service poster contest over the phone, and published the
name as Aaron Doe
rather than Erin Doe.
I've
also been caught by Dawn
and Don.
One galling thing about these stupid mistakes is that I
know I'm prone to them, and I make it a habit to check for
my usual suspects: here
and hear,
or
there,
their
and they're.
A few years ago, I tried a computer program which was
alleged to spot such errors. It did find the common
mistakes, but it also complained about sexist
diction
every time it found he
or his
or
him.
It whined about over-use of words of more
than two syllables
and urged a revision when it found
sentences in excess of 16 words.
It was worse than a nuisance, and it knew nothing of
context, so it didn't flag a their
that should have
been there
-- it spotted every there
and
their,
and demanded a confirmation from me. Since
at least 99 percent of them were proper, I was so
accustomed to clicking Approve
that I clicked right
past the errors.
Thus the program did no good, and it wasted precious loafing time, too. Further, the program said it checked for homonyms, when I really needed to check for homophones.
There are three terms for words that look or sound alike.
· A homograph
is a word spelled the same
way as another, but with a different pronunciation and
meaning. For instance, you can lead
troops into
battle, or you can install a new lead
in your
mechanical pencil.
(By analogy, we should use heterograph
for a word
with the same pronunciation and meaning, but different
spelling, as with donut
and doughnut.
)
· A homonym
has the same pronunciation and
spelling, but a different origin and meaning: i.e., the
sash
you might wear around your waist (from the
Arabic word for muslin) and a window sash
(from the
French word chassis
).
· A homophone
is pronounced the same as
another word, but has a different meaning and spelling:
peddling
and pedaling.
Some might argue that these two words shouldn't be pronounced the same, and they may be right. One of my most humiliating memories is from the 1963 awards ceremony at the end of my seventh-grade year at Evans Junior-Senior High School, just south of Greeley.
It was my honor to speak briefly of my trip to the state
spelling bee, and I told the assembled parents and students
that I had received a bronze pin
for my fourth-place
finish in the Weld County spelling bee, and a nice writing
pen
at the state contest.
I pronounced them identically, as I still do. My
teacher immediately strode to the lectern and told the
crowd that What Eddie meant to say was ...
She then
pronounced them differently, p-eh-n
for the writing
implement. I wanted to sink under the stage, although
there were pleasant thoughts of strangling her first.
As nearly as I can tell, some internal voice sounds out
words to myself as I write (not rite or wright, right?),
and in the dialect I speak after 50 years in Colorado,
peddle
and pedal
are pronounced the same.
People reared in more civilized regions might enunciate
them differently, but those people have pronunciation
problems too, as with a Denver TV announcer who once told
us of an airplane crash in Cone Joss County.
I have considered engaging a sign painter to duplicate a poster that used to hang in many newspaper city rooms, back when those were interesting places with cigar smoke and raunchy jokes.
It said A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the
ground. You're supposed to know the difference.
This indicates that homophones have long bedeviled
people in this line of work, and so, my
peddling-pedaling
mishap represents not carelessness
or stupidity, but the continuation of tradition.
How's that for spin?
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