From The Guardian Weekly, vol 162, no 1 (Thursday December 30 1999 to Wednesday January 9 2000)

HTML formatting by David Pierce

Features

Ian Mayes, readers' editor of the Guardian, whose job it is to respond to readers' complaints, sets a test

Spotting the homophone in us all

It is time for the readers' editor's first test. It is based on homophones or homonyms (not, as someone mistakenly referred to them, homophobes).

A homophone - I quote from Collins Millennium dictionary - is "one of a group of words pronounced in the same way but differing in meaning or spelling or both, as for example bear and bare".

Postgraduate students of journalism at the City University in London, to whom I gave a recent talk , had the test sprung on them. They were given a little more than five minutes to do it. In fact they were shown only the first 17 of the 20 you see here. Almost 120 students handed their papers in. Only eight students got them all right. About 30 got nearly all of them right (just one or two wrong).

Give yourself one mark for identifying the wrongly used word and another for getting the word that should have been used, making a possible total of 40 marks. Journalists and others with some professional interest in English, take five minutes. Others, a maximum of 10 (or perhaps that should be the other way round).

1. "Britain is now taking the root pioneered in the US."
2. "The unreformed House of Lords finally past into history."
3. "How can you censor a man for producing lines so sublimely enjoyable?"
4. "She juggles answering several mobiles, and retrieves the tickets from plastic bags stuffed into draws of her desk."
5. "Mr Blair sort to assuage Unionist objections."
6. ". . . a supine parliament towed the line."
7. "The burgers of Cossonay were adamant that their village's most famous socialite had not been to a single event."
8. In A Discourse on the Nuptials of the Earl of Wessex, we mentioned "Andrew's rolling gate".
9. In a report from Pristina we said someone had ". . . a Serb policeman in the sites of his rifle".
10. "The driving test teaches people nothing about diffusing confrontational situations."
11. Goole, "the original farming, fishing and fouling hamlet".
12. Describing the "eruv", the enclosure, which it was proposed to erect in Hampstead Garden Suburb, we called it "1,000 feet of fishing line supported on polls".
13. In a report about efforts to save a pub from closure we said there were "rumours that it would be raised to the ground".
14. "Softwear which reads [aloud] the contents of the screen."
15. In a piece about homosexuals in ancient Greece, we spoke of a ban forbidding certain "rights and rituals".
16. "They are trying to recall how one goes about making friends, finding the answer in taught little exchanges."
17. "The staff of the commission would not be doing their jobs properly if they waived things through."
18. "Only those who have been clubbing right round the world will not be phased . . ."
19. Is there anything more revolting than the yoke-drooling old lady in the opening cafe scene?
20. ". . . loudmouthed and chauvinistic boars".

[answers]

How did you do? 40 excellent; 35-39 very good; 30-34 not bad; less than 30: Are you by any chance working for the Guardian? I think we should be tolled.

The ones that proved most difficult for the students were 3 and 16; and the one that they nearly all got was 14.

Before anyone gets too smug, remember that here we have narrowed down the area of search to a few words and told you what you are looking for. These ubiquitous little chaps are as much a product of haste as of ignorance. Their occurrence is not in itself an indication of the decline in the standards of English for which the vigilant Guardian reader is always on the lookout.

The Guardian Weekly 30-12-1999, page 16