Its were the system fails!

I do not apologise for the title of this post, in truth I wanted to take it further. I have turned into a Spelling Pedant!

Reading an item posted on facebook today, I had to mentally replace "there" with "their" and "where" with "were" on so many occasions it made me feel physically ill.  I fully realise that not everyone is blessed with a decent education in the UK, but please people, if you are going to write in English, use the right words.

I must have been so lucky in my education that I was taught where to use the right homonym.  There are several ways to remember which spelling is required for the correct meaning to be conveyed, it's a case of finding the one that works for you.

For example, one of the worst culprits is the easiest to remember:

THERE/THEIR/THEY'RE

• There - is not HERE.
• Their - that person is the HEIR, the item is tHEIR property.
• They're = They are - the apostrophe is here to take the place of missing letters.

WHERE/WERE/WEAR/WE'RE

• Where - it is not HERE, wHERE is it?
• Were - They wERE here ERE they left.
• Wear - You wEAR glasses over your EAR.
• We're = We are - the apostrophe is here to take the place of missing letters.

So you can see that with a little simple thought and care homonyms can be tamed. (sEE with your EyE not sEA that meets the bEAch.) [oh, and that was mEEt as in sEE not mEAT as in EAT]

The biggest drawback with homonyms is that you the user has to know how to use them as a spell-checker will see "We wear here" as correct as "we were here".

So please, people, take care and learn the differences, and make sure you use the right word.  I know some will knock my use of grammar in the examples I have given, but if it works, it works!