Mixmatched pear of shoes? / gadl via Flickr.

Want some more fun reading other people’s mistakes with homonyms? It’s impossible to run out of material for this series of pears pairs of words people misuse.

.C.J. Stroud had an amazing rookie year as quarterback for the Houston Texans. His offensive coordinator said, “He’s proven that big games don’t faze him.” Unfortunately, in my local paper, the headline proclaimed, “He’s proven that big games don’t phase him.”

Another issue of the same paper included the headline, “A peak inside ‘safe injection site.’” Time was when newspapers had editors, part of whose job it was to fix errors like that. 

 We don’t expect much from the Web. A Google search result page had an ad with the headline “Books by Doctor’s.” But social media is a gold mine of misused pears.

Misused pears from social media

In a Facebook thread about the Mount Saint Helens volcanic eruption, someone commented, “I still have a vile of ash” from it. Not to be confused with a viol of ash (which would still be wrong—a viol is a musical instrument) or a vial of ash (correct).

A video posted in a history group announced, “We want to show you what the castle would have looked like in its hay day.” I’m not sure how much hay anyone would have grown around the castle in its heyday.

I followed a link to a blog post about a passage in the book of James. The author noted, “James’ warning has rung threw church history.” It should have been “through,” of course. I’m having a little difficulty picturing what it means as it is. At least it doesn’t say that the warning has wrung threw history!

Not everyone uses search engines anymore. Someone recommended, “Have you tried chatGPT? I find it quite useful when Google let’s me down.” Ah yes, apostrophes have a way of butting in where they don’t belong.

ChatGPT might be responsible for some of the real howlers I’ve seen. Take, for example, the videos on YouTube that simply show the text of what a speaker is saying. One such referred to the parlor in old houses as a “show peace.”  The speaker said showpiece.

Oh well, if humans can’t pick the right word, how can they train voice-recognition software to do any better? It might be unfair to judge the speaker on the basis of scrolling text that’s full of mistakes. He or she likely hired someone else to make the transcription.  In any case, someone ought to proofread if they want informed people to take the content seriously.

Mistakes by professional writers

Anyone can make a mistake. It’s a bit more fun to catch professional writers in the act.

A writer’s group on Facebook had a discussion about what makes real science fiction. One commenter said that time travel might be the biggest hurtle for an author writing for an audience of people who want the science plausible. Homonyms seem to be hurdle for professional writers as much as anyone else.

I have joined a group of fiction authors who critique each other’s work in progress and came across this sentence: “Dr. Sanders’ voice reigned down on him.” I’m not sure how a voice even rains down, but surely that is the intended word.

Have I made errors like these in any of my blogs? If I find anything, I destroy the evidence.