FUN WITH HOMONYMS….Matt Yglesias, whose homonym misspellings are indeed legendary, offers up this explanation:
I think you’ll see if you look around that a large portion of my generation (i.e., those of us who learned to write after the dawn of the spell checker but before the dawn of the grammar checker) have this problem.
I find this theory deeply unconvincing, mainly because in my previous life I edited text from lots of older generation types who had problems with homonyms, while today I read blogs from plenty of younger generation types who don’t. Admittedly, though, my test and control groups here are too small to draw any definitive conclusions.
If I wanted to start a red state/blue state war over this, I could suggest it has something to do with learning to read via phonics vs. whole language ? surely one of the most bizarre politicized disputes of all time ? but I have exactly zero evidence to back that up. In fact, I can’t even think of any pseudo-plausible BS along those lines just to get people riled up over the idea.
So let’s take a poll. How many people think Matt is onto something? That is, that the post-spell-check but pre-grammar-check population ? a very narrow demographic, by the way ? displays writing idiosyncracies that the rest of us don’t?
In the meantime, for the homonym challenged, there’s always the handy dandy Calpundit homonym cheat sheet….
