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.

A Facebook post warned, “where there are idol hands, the devil must be at work.” According to any monotheistic religion, any part of an idol is bad news, not just the hands. But I suspect the poster was trying to paraphrase the common maxim, “the idle brain is the devil’s workshop.” As it turns out, I have long collected similar instances of idle hands—or maybe idle brains—making mistakes with homonyms on a keyboard. When faced with a pear pair of similar words, they choose the wrong one.