See what I did there? Homonyms, you just have to love them. I mean, I really don’t know of any other language where a sentence can be written as “Whether the wether is out in the weather”, and have it make sense.
I’m fairly sure that this is due to English having words derived from so many different languages around the world. Various dialects of Gaelic, Latin, German, Danish, French; all been boiled down into that wondrous melange that we call English, and those are just pre-Empire.
Wherever the English have been (and the sun never set on the afore-mentioned Empire remember) the native tongues have been added to the language; so Australian English has changed to incorporate Indigenous words, as has the English of the United States and Canada. Also, every time England got conquered, there was a new language (and cuisine) imposed on the existing population.
Back to homonyms however. Whilst every word in the title is a legitimate word, very few of them are used correctly. The varying forms of words are something that every writer needs to not only be extremely familiar with (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), but to be aware of words that refer to the same thing, but have different forms (cloths and clothes, for example).
Speaking as a PC user, I can tell you right now that the Grammar Checker was designed by a moron. Mine has flagged a sentence on a grammatical error when I was writing ‘your Mum’ — the suggestion was to replace ‘your’ (pronoun) with ‘you’re’ (contraction). Well, that would have become a completely different sentence had I been foolish enough to follow the computer’s advice. It has also pulled me up on ‘to’, so I replaced it with ‘too’, and then ‘two’ when it was still unhappy. Since someone was going ‘to’ the beach, again, I went with mine. Though the computer seemed to think that ‘two’ was correct. Maybe there was a second beach, of which I was completely unaware?
How to spot things:
1. If it looks wrong, it most likely is. Not always, take care here.
2. Read it out loud. There are subtle differences in pronunciation that will tell you which word you should be using.
3. THEN go through the Grammar Check.
Doing the process yourself first has a threefold effect; you will strengthen your grasp on the language, you will sharpen your ability to hear if you’ve used the wrong form of the word, and you will also hear if your sentence doesn’t flow smoothly.
If you are out of breath partway through, your sentence either needs a comma, or pruning. Even if you know the language forwards, backwards and upside-down, I would still recommend reading your work aloud. You will frequently find a word that jars, or that something is unclear. If it’s unclear to you, then your reader doesn’t have a hope.
Another thing to watch for during this process is the transposed digit. Please, check these things carefully, it would be quite embarrassing to have the Boer War, for example, set in 1985 (well, you can if you’re writing an alternative history — but again, I will expect robots)#metalmickeyrulesok
And as is always the case; here’s an exception. People do not, on the whole, speak in a grammatical fashion, they DO unknowingly use the wrong word (allusion/ illusion — except/accept for example), they DO have split infinitives, and dangling participles (To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before). Do NOT let anyone tell you how your character is to sound, but do make it clear to the reader if there are foreign words. The easiest way to do this is to have one character say something in the language of your choice, and have another character translate vie a question, or a statement. For example; in my latest published book, I have a character referred to as vyeo mlezi (Swahili), my other character then asks when he got to be a Noble Guardian. If you do this correctly, then the work will flow. If you’ve followed Tolkien’s example, and made up a language of your own, then you can explain any unfamiliar terms via exposition, or a more detailed conversation.
So there you have the homonym. Like Hobbits, they’re tricksy, but it all works out in the end.
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