I texted my daughter today. She’s been dog sitting for a neighbor, and when she came home this morning before school, her eyes were half-open. When I dropped her off at school, she still hadn’t woken up entirely, so at noon, I texted her.
Hi, honey! You doing okay? Staying awake?
Her response:
barley
Proper Punctuation Is Aggressive?
My daughter turns sixteen in a matter of days. Having a mom for an editor, she knows that I prefer punctuating my texts, and thankfully, she doesn’t hold it against me. “I can hear you in your texts, so it’s not weird.” But apparently, when her friends properly punctuate, it feels aggressive? Out of touch? Weird? I don’t know, but it’s some kind of mixture of all three. That whole idea of attaching emotion to proper punctuation (other than extreme joy at handling the English language so well) is foreign to me.
What I didn’t point out to my sophomore daughter is that she answered my question with a cereal grain. Barley. I’ve become a typo pro, so I immediately knew she meant to write barely, to express that she is only slightly staying awake. That got me thinking…
Barely and barley are only differentiated by the placement of the “e.” What other words are like this, I wondered. I’ve compiled some examples below.
Word Pairs
Bear and bare
Quiet and quite
Dairy and diary
Martial and marital
The words in each pair are differentiated by moving one letter, but what a profound difference that one switch makes! None of these words is remotely like its counterpart. A bear is a large furry animal that enjoys honey; bare means simple or naked (sidenote: this word pair is also a homophone, which means same sound but different spelling). Martial has to do with war; marital has to do with marriage (I realize some unions can be quite combative but hopefully only in a metaphorical way).
As an editor, the pair that I see mixed up the most often is quite and quiet. I commonly see one where the other should be. Perhaps the writer truly doesn’t know how to spell the word correctly, but I suspect most of these errors happen simply by hitting the letters in the wrong order. It’s quiet possible that fingers are flying too quickly, and they press the e first when they should be pressing the t. (See what I did there?)