Do You Hear it or Here it?
It’s surprising to mehow often I receive a letter or advertisement in the mail with grammar orpunctuation mistakes. I sometimes get a manuscript for editing with the samemistakes, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Not everybody who findsthemselves writing some sort of missive managed to test out of Freshman Englishin college.
Having already tackledthe subject of passive verbs, I decided to continue the trend by explaining apair of homonyms. Homonyms are words that sound the same but have differentmeanings.
The two words I’m goingto pick on today are here and hear. They sound the same, but theyaren’t spelled the same and they can’t be used interchangeably.
Here means ‘this spot whereI am,’ or ‘the area where I am’. It designates a location.
Hear is the act ofperceiving sound by way of the ear. Sometimes a bass instrument or a reallyloud sound can be felt vibrating through your body, but that’s not hearing. Ifyou truly can’t remember which is which, then notice and remember that the wordthat relies on ears has the word ‘ear’ in it.
I once received amanuscript that had the town crier shouting, “Here ye, here ye!” I tied mybrain in knots trying to figure out if he was really instructing thetownspeople to gather around him. It didn’t seem right to me, but maybe I waswrong. So I googled it, and found out that it was supposed to be “Hear ye, hearye!” Which translates from Medieval English to “Listen you, listen you.” And ofcourse, you can’t listen if you don’t have an ear, so the correct word to useis hear.
Memorize the meaningsof these two words, and then substitute that meaning when you use one of them,to see if you used the correct one.
I will build a househere. = I will build a house in this spot. That makes sense.
I will build a househear. = I will build a house by listening. That doesn’t make sense.
Did you here thedoorbell? = Did you in this location the doorbell? No, that doesn’t make sense.
Did you hear thedoorbell? = Did you perceive the doorbell? That does make sense.
I hope you enjoyed thismini-lesson. What was the worst use of either here or hear thatyou’ve noticed?
