With a Bit of Tact, You Can Try New Tack : Language: Here’s a quick guide to confusing sound-alike words.

Pssst. Are you secretly confused by certain sound-alike words but too embarrassed to ask anyone about them? Perhaps taking this quick quiz will help:

Academic grammarians often give common usage dilemmas short 1) (shift, shrift). Instead of 2) (deferring, demurring) to such snobbery, we should 3) (mitigate, militate) against it. Luxury estates are just as 4) (ripe, rife) with usage errors as neighborhoods with 5) (track, tract) houses.

ANSWERS

1) Shrift. Because shift can mean a period of time (“the late shift”), it’s conceivable that you’d give an unwelcome person a “short shift.” But the “shrift” in “short shrift” comes from the religious word “shrive,” meaning to hear a penitent’s confession and grant absolution.

Occasionally, a priest, perhaps desiring a shorter shift, cuts this ceremony short, thus giving the person “short shrift.”

2) Deferring. Because the adjective demure means modest and shy, many people demurely assume that the verb demur means to give in or defer to someone. In fact, a person who “demurs” at something does almost the opposite--objects or delays. Thus, a person who “demurred” at such snobbery, would be protesting it, not deferring (submitting) to it.

3) Militate. Mitigate , in addition to referring to any scandal that occurs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, means to reduce something. While, conceivably, you could “mitigate” snobbery, the better word here is militate, which is often followed by against. Militate means to bring a force to bear on something, hence its Latin root, militare .

4) Rife. Because ripe means fully developed, luxury estates could be said to be “ripe” with errors, especially if they had orchards with malformed apples. But the correct word here is rife , meaning prevalent or abundant.

5) Tract. Because some “tract houses” are laid out along a “track” (set course or route), these two terms can give us the run-around. “Tract houses” are so called because they’re built on a “tract” (a parcel of land).

After reading this tract, you’re surely on the right track.