Learn Your Damn Homophones
learnyourdamnhomophones.com
A friend and I put this site together out of our frustration. Mixing up homophones needs to end—now.
learnyourdamnhomophones.com
My favorite bit is in a long list of words, "Shoes, goes, does." Did you notice that the placement of the comma means that does there is the the plural of doe and not the third person conjugation of "to do"? Me neither until it was pointed out to me.
Of course we'll never fix it. See http://abusez.in/tag/konfusion and http://www.mantex.co.uk/samples/spell.htm for two examples of the mess that would result if we did.
That being said, I don't think most grammar mistakes are made out of stupidity, rather carelessness. I've accidentally dropped a "they're" instead of a "their" knowing very well which one was correct, and when I go back to correct it, I often wonder how it even happened, or what I was thinking that allowed the wrong one to slip in.
... That's all I have to say, but I'd like to note that I don't think you're supposed to end a sentence with the preposition word "in" ...
Except people who say 'effect the changes' instead of 'implement', Affect as a noun I can only think of as in affectation
Auditory learning plays a much bigger role for native speakers, and you also need to consider the proportion of reading/writing vs speaking.
Although "its" is also possessive you don't use an apostrophe because that would confuse its with "it's"
Then if the word ends in an s the rules are different unless it's a name, then the rules are different again, unless it's a biblical name then the rules are different to the last rule, except for Moses and Jesus which are exceptions to this. Then of course there are always a few special cases - St James' park (footbal ground) but St James's park (park)
Of course if the word originally comes from another language then you have to use the rules from the language instead, well sometimes, say for French but not German or Dutch, actually only sometimes for Dutch depending.
Why doesn't this mistake carry over to the gendered forms? That is, why don't people write "hi's" or "her's"?
Couldn't make heads or tails of his writing. Maybe because it's shifted so much in the intervening centuries that it's only marginally comprehensible to someone who learned the modern tongue?
How has Gutenberg changed the rate of change in languages? Has greater availability of printed materials held things steady longer?
How is the Intertubes changing this? Has the ability to instantly view the work of people representing a zillion languages accelerated change?
The value of the words in the dictionary stems from their widespread use. Intrinsically, they don't have any.
Hint: 'E' stands for Effect and Entity (a noun). 'A' stands for Affect and Action (a verb).
Except sometimes we accept "effect" as a verb: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/affect.html
-r
Maybe we need a second page with curse terms. For example, it's "fucking" and not "fucken" or "fuckin"
Hooray for the South?
Compliment and complement really are pronounced the same, though. Pronunciation is fairly discrete, either there's a noticable difference, or there's no difference at all.
The phenomenon you have fallen prey to is hyperarticulation, also responsible for the 'off-ten' pronunciation of 'often'. (Compare to soften, for example.)
Pronunciation is a bad place on which to perch your well-trained pride.
For the record, the OP's strong reaction to people getting the words wrong is not something that bugs me. I commonly mistype words like weather/whether and there/their.
ITYM it should of
Too much of the internet is like this, unfortunately.
Correct, but not worthy.
Not upvoted.
Correct grammar is for people who have too much time on their hands.
Or people who care about expressing themselves clearly.
...which, like it or not, is often a fairly reliable mental cue for determining how much importance to place on someone's opinion. Clarity is only part of the equation.
English has the most moddy grammar of all languages, with so many exceptions and shit - this is one of the things I hope disappear as the world embraces English.
Which doesn't cover every case I can think of, but demonstrates the difference. Also lose is a verb, loose is (almost always) an adjective.
I need to print a few copies and hang them around the office ;)