Okay, so, over on one of the many forums where I post, someone posted a comment to a guy who’d behaved in a very charming way. She said:
I swear, I want to bare your children!
Everyone continued on as if nothing odd had happened. They chimed in about how charming the guy had been and how she’d not be offering kids so easily, had she delivered any in the past, etc.
I was sooo tempted to post:
Watch out. Michael Jackson’s in trouble for doing that!
But I did not.
I shared the story of my instincts here instead. Where it can be properly appreciated.
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But homophones are *so* tricky!!! Pshaw. I couldn’t have held back. I’m the guy who went apoplectic in a meeting when someone said that business e-mails and e-mails to customers didn’t need to be grammatically correct because English was “evolving.” Of course, I would use almost any excuse to yell at people in meetings, but in this case the issue was subject/verb agreement. It wasn’t like it was some weird declension thing that only English majors would know either, but just plural vs. singular.
I have a friend who is a) foreign, b) conscientious about his English and c) way too smart. He hacked his e-mail client and his word processor so that every e-mail he sends and every document he writes is checked for instances of “there/their/they’re,” “your/you’re” and “its/it’s.” At each of these words it asks him if that’s the correct usage or if he should change to one of the others. Sure, he has to know, it doesn’t figure out from the context if he’s got the right word, but I’ve never seen a mistake from him.
Compare and contrast with the blowhole I used to work with who would add words that he commonly misspelled to his spellchecker’s dictionary just so it wouldn’t bother him about them anymore.
Hee hee…what a brilliant correction that would have been…DEVIOUS. Wow, I don’t think *I* could have resisted. }:o)