June 1, 2011:  Time for a refresher on homophones?  Think of it as spring cleaning for the mind.

Blame it on texting, but lately I've noticed the frequent substituting of one homophone for another.  Homophones, as you know, are words that are pronounced alike but have different meanings and/or different spellings.

This calls to mind my college linguistics class, where hometown was ascertained by pronunciation of the words "merry," "marry," and "Mary."  If you pronounced them all the same, thus rendering them homophones, you were likely from Syracuse.  But I digress.

Let's begin with "your" and "you're." Simple enough:  "your" is the pronoun meaning "belonging to you," while "you're" means "you are."  If we simply recall that an apostrophe marks the omitted letter or letters in a contraction (when not denoting possession), and read what we have written, it is pretty obvious when we have incorrectly used a word's homophone.  Similar are "its" (meaning "belonging to it") and "it's" (meaning "it is"), as discussed in last month's column about possessives.

Next, if you are going "there" to meet your friends, and "they're" there to meet you with "their" car parked nearby, life is pretty good and you've gotten your homophones right.  Easy enough if one just takes the time to think before writing or driving.

And "who's" going to let us know "whose" rules we are using?

"To" figure this out, one merely needs to do "two" things:  think first, then reread what you've written, "too."

These are the more commonly misused homophones, but there are hundreds of others.  Some that often trick writers include:  "principal" (a person in a leading position, such as the head of a school) and "principle" (a moral or value); "capital" (a city serving as the center of government (of a state, for example), or an uppercase letter) and "capitol" (the building in which a state government meets or (capitalized) the building in which the United States government meets in D.C.); "sight" (vision) and "site" (a location or place); and, a tricky one, "affect" (verb meaning "to have an influence on") versus "effect" (noun meaning "the result of such influence").

In days of "yore" they'd never mix up "your" and "you're." OMG.  But if U txt me I'll *smile.*