How to Admit you Suffer from Homophone Phobia

Yes, I suffer from Homophone Phobia . It is an aversion to homophone misuse. This also makes me a bit of a hypocrite, because I occasionally abuse homophones. Homophones are words that sound alike and are spelled differently or have different meanings. The word rose can mean a flower or to rise. The homophones that can get a writer in trouble are those that have different spellings, such as “buy, bye and by”.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Ask yourself if you cringe when you read a forum post where the writer typed “to” instead of “too”.

2. Look into your soul. Spell check will not catch homophone misuse, although grammar check may. Have you later discovered (in an article already posted online, for all the world to see) where you typed “there” instead of “their”? Do you quickly scramble to fix your error, while finding ways to let everyone know it was just a “typo”?

3. Familiarize yourself with common homophones, to help ease your phobia. They include such words as: accept , except, affect , effect, are , our, by , bye , buy, complement , compliment, dear , deer, do , due, heal , heel, hear , here, its , it’s, know , no, morning , mourning, one , won, ,principle , principal, to , too , two, they’re , their , there, weather , whether, who’s , whose, your and you’re.

Tips & Warnings

• You may know the difference in the words, but when typing, your fingers may not!
• Before expressing outrage at another writer's error - remember it could be you!

[Gottaloveit]

on 1/30/2009 Too funny - I thought this article was going to be about a phobia against phones! Ok, I HATE phones so I was hopeful. But, yes, I too (to? two? ha ha) am a stickler for homophones too. Thanks.

[Upon-Request]

on 1/29/2009 Homophone Anonymous ... can we start one? Good article ;)