I’ve been accused of being the “grammar police” more than once. I’m really not. Language, particularly English, is notoriously subjective. Even the experts don’t always agree on the rules. Case in point: an argument about the use of the Oxford comma (the comma that goes at the end of a list or series before the conjunction) resulted in a $10 million court settlement in Maine in 2018.
Litigious commas aside, confusion over homonyms, homophones and homographs is the cause of frequent angst.
Homonyms are words that sound and are spelled the same but can mean different things. The word “pen,” for example, can refer to a writing instrument or a holding area for animals. Homophones are words that sound the same, can be spelled the same way, but have different meanings. “Deer “ and “dear,” or “brake” and “break” are oft confused. Homographs are even more confusing. They’re spelled the same way, but have different meanings and different sounds. “Wind,” for example, can be a weather phenomenon or what you do to an old watch to keep it running.
Contractions—intended to simplify things—add to the confusion. “Your” vs. “you’re,” “it’s” vs. “its” and “there,” “their” and “they’re” hang folks up frequently. Then there’s the “lead” vs. “led” problem. “Led” is the correct spelling for the past tense of the verb “lead.”
And then there’s one of my biggest pet peeves: messy capitalization. Why do sloppy capitals bother me? Because they aren’t easy to fix using “find and replace” commands, making my day job more difficult.
In elementary school we’re taught certain words are worthy of capitalization according to relatively standard rules. The first word in a sentence, proper names, etc. In adulthood we tend to fall back on one rule everyone seems to remember, but which is only applicable in specific situations: Capitalizing whichever Words we Deem most Important. Government officials and agencies are the worst offenders, by far.
To be fair, all this grammar trouble probably isn’t a new development, it’s just that people whose writing skills would never have been subject to scrutiny after they got out of school are now tweeting, posting, and generating memes for all the world to see. Mistakes are inevitable, especially since we do so much of our writing on tiny screens with our thumbs nowadays. That doesn’t mean we should stop making an effort.
On that note, this week we’re probably guaranteed to make some glaring grammatical error. Just because.
By Niki Turner | [email protected]
