Intolerance and Homophonia

As I've noted before, pointing out other people's typos and grammatical mistakes leads to bad karma. But, it sure is fun, especially when it happens to the Paper of Record: The New York Times. The Grey Lady. The Paper With a Lot of Nicknames.

I was browsing through the New York/Region section, passing through on my way to read today's Metropolitan Diary column.

(Metro Diary is published on Mondays and features reader-submitted stories about life in the big city. It's what papers did before blogs. It's usually very cloying and treacly in a Reader's Digest-y kind of way, yet it also manages to reinforce the smug superiority sported by many New York City-ites. I read it religiously.)

Anyway, there was this following gem of a headline in the Metro section (it's been fixed already):

Of course, the mistake is Scene instead of Seen, which are homophones. At first I thought it was some new hipster slang: "Scene: (v.) The act of participating in A-list social events. -- 'She scened at the Viper Room.'"

I don't remember if I've ever made that particular error. However, homophone switchups I've made include:

* Peak/Peek (I always have to be extra careful with this one, it's been known to sneak out from time to time)
* Beatles/Beetles (yes, I actually did this once)
* Discrete/Discreet (two different words, two different meanings)

And of course, I have been known to add in superfluous apostrophes from time to time (but I feel awful about it afterwards.)

Anyway, just a bit of Grammar Policing this afternoon (and you can be darn sure I double- and triple-checked this entry to make sure I didn't make any misteaks).

Thanks -- Joe