Watch out for sound-alike words

The term for words that sound the same but have different meanings (and sometimes spellings) is homophone (click for a definition), which sounds an awful lot like homophobe, so you can think of them as sound-alikes if you like. (Homophone is from Latin and means "same sound.") Whichever you prefer, homophones or sound-alikes, be aware that they can sneak in past spell-checkers and twist the meaning of your writing, frustrate your readers, and make you look a bit (or a lot, depending on how often you mix them up) silly.

One of the most frequently abused sound-alike pairs is your/you’re, which I wrote about here. But I am continually surprised by the places these things sneak in. For example, I’ve been reading a book by a writer who has a powerful way with words and stories, published by a major publisher of Christian titles. I assume this particular book has gone through a few review cycles with an editor, and very likely a copy editor and a production editor. Several eyes have seen this book before it went into print. And yet I’ve found two glaring instances where they used a homophone rather than the word they really meant to use.

The first one was flare, and from the context of the sentence, which was talking about doing something "with flare," it was obvious that he meant to use flair.

Later in the book, the author spoke of something that another writer was "eluding to." However, eluding is something that the Roadrunner does, as in "The Roadrunner easily eluded Wile E. Coyote’s trap." The word the author wanted here was alluding, because writers quite often make indirect references to things.

OK, so maybe this seems like a nit-picky thing. I’m enjoying the book very much, and I understand what the writer is saying, so what’s the big deal? The big deal is that everytime you cause your reader to stumble over a word, even if it’s ever so slight, you lose something. It might be your readers’ momentum, as they stumble over the wrong word, reflect for a moment to figure out what you meant, and then go on. If this happens too frequently, your readers may lose patience with you and give up entirely. Most importantly, mistakes like this can reduce your credibility, a hard-to-gain commodity. Don’t squander your credibility on such trivial mistakes as homophone mixups.

Make friends with your dictionary. It doesn’t hurt to look up a word or two every now and then to ensure that it means what you think it means.