About a week ago, as my wife and I were sitting at the breakfast table, she reading one newspaper, and I, another, we coincidently and simultaneously came across two completely different stories, each with the same misuse of a word.
I won’t identify the authors, because such mistakes are common and embarrassing; it will probably happen to me more than I’d like to admit. Let’s see if you can catch the differences. Don’t feel bad if you don’t, because they involve subtle variations in spelling and meaning between words uncommonly known as homonyms, homophones, and homographs. Omigosh! I hope that you haven’t left me already. Don’t worry. I’m no expert in the nuances associated with these nouns, and I had to consult print and electronic dictionaries.
Here goes: An article which appeared in the Courier News about how to stay alert for car trouble in the summer used the following sentence, “…be alert for slow moving farm vehicles, narrow bridges, and animals that may wonder onto the roadway.” Another article appeared in The Star-Ledger on the same day, discussing various aspects of podcasting, and read in part, as follows, “Sometimes, when a professor is talking in class the mind wonders. (But) with podcasts, the student can rewind and listen to lectures on the slopes in Vail, riding a bike across campus, anywhere…”
Did you catch the slip-up in the use of English? In each of these two sentences, the correct meaning intended by the authors is not “wonder,” but “wander.” These two words are homophones, that is, they sound alike but have different meanings. (See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/homophone.)
OK, so I’m a word geek!
1 comment:
Ah, but it's even worse than we think, I think. Wonder and wander aren't homonyms. Isn't wonder pronounced "oneder?" Wander is harder to write phonetically without the sideways : that would go over the a, but isn't it more of a "waander?"
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