Folks, there's a logical explanation for a lot of the errors that are pet peeves. Many of them are similar sounding words with similar sounding meanings.

Some years back, there was a very effective movement in education called "whole language." Well, it was effective at being adopted; it wasn't quite as effective when it came to educating.

The premise of whole language is that learning to read is all about making meaning from text - and it doesn't matter whether you get *exactly* the right word, as long as you basically get the meaning from the text... and, well, maybe it's not the *author's* meaning but as long as it means something to you, that's "right."

All that old-fashioned inane stuff about pronouncing words correctly and knowing how to break a word into syllables... oh, that is horrible torture and will make our children hate reading and never know the joy of literature.

It works fine through grade 3 or 4... and then we get words like granite and granted, vaccination and vacation, malevolence and male violence.

The educational journals even have this stuff - one highly respected book about teaching to underprepared college students begins with saying that whether you are "reading from the cannon" ... YIKES!!! and there's another homophonic blunder on the same page! (I'm glad to say that the actual articles in the book don't have such errors, so I suspect editing was not as rigorous there.) I wish I could say this were uncommon.

For me, it's a deep peeve, especially since the more I read of inexact English, the more likely errors are to invade *my* communication. I like communicating clearly. I treasure it.

Some of my students have specific difficulties with actually *hearing* the differences in the sounds of words; too many of them, however, simply haven't been taught to even care.

(I don't run around correcting every utterance - it would not be effective and it would be annoying and negative. It does, however, make my job and their learnign much more difficult.)