Homophones With No Rhyme and Very Little Reason
I perhaps ought to let homophones lie for a while, but such quaint ones keep popping up in The Times that they cry for notice.
A homophone, as you know, is a word that sounds like another but is spelled differently and has a different meaning--for example, piece and peace .
What causes the merriment is when a writer or copy editor mistakes one for the other.
Perhaps the most amusing recent example was in a subhead over a story about an escaped murder suspect who eluded police for seven weeks until he was tracked down by bloodhounds.
It read: “He is caught hiding in a back yard after having alluded pursuers in wilds of the Grand Canyon.”
Of course, the words are not true homophones since they are not pronounced alike, but evidently the headline writer did not know that.
Another recent example occurred in a story about Roseanne and her husband. It ended, “So really what they do is go to work and come home to be with their family and try to make due. “
Oh well, it might have been dew .
As I have suggested, there are three reasons why homophones are so common in today’s newspapers: learning that is more audio than visual; the extinction of the old-time proofreader, who knew everything; and the computer spell-check, which does not question words that are spelled correctly, even when they are the wrong words.
Lael Littke of Pasadena and Diane Hoover of The Times have both sent me an anonymous verse that illustrates the latter phenomenon:
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I’ve run this poem through it,
I’m shore your pleas too no,
It’s letter perfect in it’s weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.
The Times certainly is not the only offender. This virus is nationwide. Another reader sends me a clipping from the Pasadena Star News with a headline that reads, “Bradley’s career may lay in ruins.”
Not only is lay the wrong word, but the head is questionable as fact: Even though he will not seek reelection, it can not be said that Tom Bradley’s long and productive career lies in ruins.
To revive another recent subject--movie anachronisms--Margot Kamens of Whittier recalls that her husband, a physician, noticed something strange while watching “The Man in the Glass Booth,” a film about the trial of a Nazi war criminal. When an attorney held up an X-ray purporting to show the defendant’s shoulder, Kamens realized that it was actually of a woman’s pelvis, with an intrauterine device in place.
That, of course, is not necessarily an anachronism, since IUDs probably did exist at the time, but its turning up in a man’s shoulder is rather an astonishing improbability.
Andy Lee, former head of the Universal Research Department, notes that in the movie “Unforgiven,” a hooker asks Clint Eastwood whether he would like a “freebie.” Lee doubts that the word freebie was in use in 1880, the movie’s time frame. “Still,” he says, “it doesn’t sound out of keeping in the movie; does that make it all right?”
Why not? Modern slang interpolated into a period movie may offend purists, but it doesn’t hurt the plot. It happens all the time.
Frances Rosenberg of Pacific Palisades notes that whatever the period of a movie--including ancient and medieval--women always wear mascara.
On another front, Lin Hildeburn of Pasadena sends me a clipping of an Associated Press story (not from The Times) that contains a fascinating example of the dangling participle.
It appears under the headline “Californians invaded by rodents,” and reads:
“Diving into dishwashers, prowling around the pool, prying in the pantry, California homeowners are reporting a clash of mice and man from tony Orange County to the east San Francisco Bay.”
As the next paragraph tells us, no wonder that the exterminator has found some of these diving, prowling, prying homeowners “quivering atop tables.”
Fred E. Bond Jr. of Lake View Terrace deplores the use of transportation units for cars and trucks in the classified section. He wonders if we will soon have transportation unit dealers.
Actually, pre-owned transportation unit dealers.
