The tail of the tale or the tale of the tail?

Recently, I had to write a long text in English and when I went through it before sending it (I always have to double-check my spelling) I came across an old mistake of mine, which I thought I had managed to get rid of over the years. The mistake was the good old see-sea homophone mix up. Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelt differently and mean completely different things. The two (or sometimes more) words do sound exactly the same and when I(*_) write (right?) I automatically say the things I'm writing so sometimes I confuse things a bit. Even the inbuilt spell-checks cannot correct these things because the pairs of the homophones (see-sea, war-wore, write-right, sale-sail...) are both in the dictionary.














(picture from here)

Have you read Alice in Wonderland? Do you remember the "Mouse's tale" ? In the story the mouse says: "Mine is a long and a sad tale!" Alice thinks the mouse means a 'sad tail' and she is very surprised. So, Lewis Caroll had to come up with a nice, long, winding tail-poem. It seems that homophone mix-ups do have their uses, after all.


Do you find anything strange with the following sentences? Can you correct the mistakes in them?

Yesterday she died her hair.
Have you bought the meet?
There car is bigger than ours.
She stepped on the break but the car didn't stop.
Witch one is your watch?
The whether is awful today.
Piece, brother!
You have very week mussels!
Sir Robin is a very brave night.
That's hour house, over there.

(You can find the key here.)

Words often confused

Well, this new post is not a puzzle. For a change, I decided to blog about a real EFL topic: words that can be confused. However, if you don't feel like practising vocabulary, never mind, come back this Sunday for the new puzzle.

There are some words in English that resemble other words simply too much. The difference in meaning is usually not proportional to the small difference in the form. One or two letters can make or break a sentence. For example, speaking of an 'economic car' would not make too much sense, whereas an 'economical car' actually means something: a car which is cheap to operate and maintain. Word pairs such as lie-lay , beside-besides , affect-effect or desert-dessert should be familiar to all foreign learners of English above intermediate level. But there are other traps similar to these. In fact, there are lots and lots of words in English that can be confused, and some of them are occasionally mixed up even by native speakers. There is a very handy site, where you can spend some time on improving or testing your knowledge about these words. The thing that I especially like about this site is that the verbs are tested in all (or at least several) of their various forms.

And if you are still here you surely deserve this nice dessert:













(picture from here)