On June 24, 2019 I received an email from Alejandra Villalobos commenting that she had enjoyed reading my November 12, 2009 blog post titled Stage freight and other true typos or yakwirms. In that post I had linked to the English-language Wikipedia page on Homophone. Alejandra said English is not her native language, and reading Wikipedia had helped her learn.
She recommended an article by Katherine Torgersen at Website
Planet on June 6, 2019 about homophones titled Are you talking aloud? Or is
talking allowed? Watch what you write, to make sure it’s right. Examples there (shown
with humorous illustrations) include:
chile-chili-chilly, which-witch, brake-break, bare-bear, exercise-exorcise,
bear-beet, pea-pee, flea-flee, whine-wine, aisle-isle-I’ll, throne-thrown.
Linking to Wikipedia pages has both advantages and
disadvantages. One advantage is that links to their pages usually are stable,
in contrast with web sites from persons or organizations that get lost from sites
being reorganized. Another is that some pages describe the history of very
specific terms, like a subtype of thrown being Defenestration (throwing someone
out of a window).
A disadvantage is that some Wikipedia pages are rather
shallow. For example, the page on Stage fright says nothing about how common it
is. On August 12, 2015 I blogged about how There’s really no mystery about how
common stage fright is.
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