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Comment by linuxlizard | Hacker News Reader

Several years ago I worked for a company that made a usb+network and usb-only skew of their product. The usb-only boards were the same as the usb+network boards with a few parts not populated.

We started getting tech support complaints when we sold the product into China. Turns out, an enterprising vendor bought a single usb+network printer, desoldered the EEPROM (containing the ethernet mac address). Then that vendor bought usb-only (cheaper) products, added the additional parts and bulk copied the single eeprom image (with the mac address) onto the new products, selling them as the more expensive usb+network sku. Result: a dozen+ of our product running on the LAN with the same mac address.

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Sorry to side-track this, but does anyone know if there is a reason why we make homophone spelling errors? Do we sound words out as we write them? Neurologically, what is happening? It doesn't sound automatically the case that the pathways for concept -> word -> write actually flow through a concept -> word -> sound -> write path. It's not a confusion of the word since this user clearly knows SKU is not SKEW.

And /u/linuxlizard, if you don't mind saying, were you using speech-to-text to write that comment?

A decent proportion of the population frequently run internal monologues in the voiced manner - when I'm typing this out I can hear (not actually hear but mentally hear) someone speaking the words as I type. I assume the frequency of homophone typos are due primarily to this - since both skew and SKU are identical in my inner monologue and I'm trusting my fingers to choose the right combination.

I think homophone spelling errors are a different issue though - english education in the US is really quite poor so a lot of grammatical rules[1] (they're/their/there) and spelling aren't really well impressed on society at large - people will hear a term in conversation and start using it in their own speech, when they arrive at typing it out they'll make their best guess at spelling and it'll probably end up a roll of the dice which homophone their spell-check ends up shoveling them towards.

1. /me types while admitting they constantly type in spoken english - preferring the spoken sentence construction rules. Something something glass houses and stones.

Thanks for answering. Of course, I have the opposite of your second sentence, mispronouncing words I've only ever read :)

Ah, I still internally mispronounce Quay - no matter how hard I try and relearn it as KEY.

> english education in the US is really quite poor so a lot of grammatical rules[1] (they're/their/there) and spelling aren't really well impressed on society at large

This is false. It was impressed into us many times throughout grade, middle, and high school. People just don’t care enough to get the right spelling because they were using the words natively long before they learned to spell them.

Backing this up- I see that complaint all the time about US education, but I know me and all my peers had this impressed on us throughout our (public) schooling. People just don't care because to them, the word is right but the spelling part is a formality that can be ignored.

For what it's worth, I started making homophonic spelling errors after my English improved.

I wonder if I'm unconsciously mimicking errors from others, or if something in my brains has changed.

SKU Stock Keeping Unit. Sorry. Vs Skew. I probably am using the word "SKU" wrong but it's what we called the slight variations of product.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stock-keeping-unit-sku....

No no. I know what you meant and it's a harmless typo obviously.

Typos are what happens when I post too quickly while waiting for my app to boot.

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