Grammar'ing With Google - Season 1 Episode 1 "Say It Ain't Sew"

Today on FB someone recommended the book "A Garlic Testament" by Stanley Crawford. Apparently he's going out to New Mexico this fall to "sew garlic with Stan". A few comments down he posted a correction - he meant he'd be sowing garlic with Stan this autumn.

Now in the meantime I'd wondering about the use of s-e-w and I did a Google search for sewing garlic, which returned 3,360,000 results. A search for sowing garlic only returned 547,000.

"That's a popular misspelling" the future sower of garlic responded when I posted my findings on FB.

Sew and Sow are homophones, words that sound the same but differ in spelling and meaning. A homophone shouldn't be confused with a homonym. A homonym is a word with the same spelling and pronounciation but can have many different meanings (like the word set for example).

For non-native English speakers (such as myself) homophones, homonyms, and homographs can be a little tricky and lots of ESL (English as a Second Language) materials are devoted to helping people learning English to get it right. Monsieur Redacteur who is a Professeur d'Anglais has this helpful advice: "Don't think about it."

Apparently 3 million plus people don't.

Image courtesy of Pound Exclaim.

And that's all for Grammar'ing with Google for today folks. Until next time.