Does your spell check let you type things like "partridge in a pair tree"? Does a pare of scissors make you smile or wince? Pair/pare/pear are all homophones--don’t be homophonophobic! Homophones are words that sound alike but have different meanings. They can be spelled differently from each other or they may be spelled the same (also known as homonyms), and they do bedevil spell checkers, because, for instance, “there,” “their,” and “they’re” are all perfectly acceptable and grammatically useful words. They just can’t substitute for one another because they are, and mean, very different things.
The idea for this blog came from longtime Max Syntax fan Leyla Bandy. (In fact, she voted for that name for this blog!) so a big thanks to her. There's a lot of interest out there: Between them, the two Facebook groups “Knowing the Difference Between Their, There, and They’re” and “The Correct Usage of You’re, Your, There, Their, and They’re” total 313,159 fans – a number that doubtless grows daily.
While such enthusiasm is heartening, I’ve never been one to use knowledge of such distinctions as a tool of judgment. Far more fun it is, and more kind, in this season of goodwill, to explore the various homophones out there and look at their meanings and their (sometimes very witty) uses and misuse.
Fred Gwynne, perhaps best known as the actor who played Herman Munster, has three gently humorous and hugely enjoyable books of homonyms/homophones:
All of them make great kids' gifts this holiday season, for both word-loving children and those little ones perhaps a bit mystified by this English language.
Here, among the adults, we’ve explored the issue of waiting with “bated” and “baited” breath in another Max Syntax blog post: The first word describes a cat holding its breath while it waits for its mousy dinner to mosey by; the other describes the cat that wisely chews cheese beforehand, baiting its exhale with an attractive (to vermin, at least) fermented milk savor. And the idiom, correctly put, is "with bated breath."
Confusing such words unintentionally does give one’s writing the sad flavor of undereducation or sloppiness, and neither spell check nor Microsoft’s grammar checker will save it. Yet intentionally playing with homophones can be a bit of silly fun—or an awful pun.
Consider my position as Chairman of the Bored in a group I ran in college, or a band I’ve seen, Bear Hands. They don’t rip apart the guitars with their bare hands, but I admit I was amused enough to wonder if they’d ever play a gig with bear-paw gloves.
Similarly, I once idly wondered if Art Basil might be a tastier European destination than Art Basel, the famed Swiss art fair. The naval oranges are a sailor’s delight; the gorilla warfare might be pretty peaceful after all. (Of course, correctly speaking, oranges have navels, just like people, and the “little wars” of guerillas are as deadly as the big ones.)
As the holiday season amps up and up, a little homophonic request: let the angry grammarians among us wield our red pencils more for peace of mind than giving others a piece of our mind; and gently correct the confused seekers of whirled peas, asking instead for what Charlie Brown and Linus sought: peace on earth and goodwill toward all.
