Humorous homonymns

I am a pedant and a grammar geek.  I'm normally the one who gets tweaked by apostrophes in the wrong place and always notices when someone uses the wrong word and it really tweaks me off.  (The large annoyance factor has to do with my Aspergers, I'm pretty sure.)  (Which is why I was so surprised that this weekend at the synod's youth gathering I wasn't the one to spot the repeating error in the devotion directions--it said "scared" instead of "sacred," so there was like a whole page talking about "scared space," and once somebody pointed it out to me it was pretty funny, especially considering it's October and I'm on the board of a group planning a small haunted house in town.)

But, anyway, in fic I can usually tell when someone has too much reliance on their spellchecker and not enough on an actual dictionary to make sure they're using the right word.

Today I spotted a perennial favorite: "rouge" instead of "rogue"

Rogue (the word they meant) means "a person who is dishonest or immoral; a man who causes trouble in a playful way."  "Rogue" is also the name of one of the X-Men, and the name of Luke Skywalker's squadron in Star Wars.

Rouge, on the other hand, is an old-fashioned word for red (well, in English it's old fashioned, in French it's the regular word for it), and also an old-fashioned name for certain types of makeup, usually what we now call "blush" (i.e. the red stuff you put on your cheeks to give you color).  The nightclub Moulin Rouge (the setting for the movie of the same name) means "The Red Mill," so named for the red windmill on top of the building.

Having your hard-bitten investigators sitting around a table talking about bringing in someone who  "went rouge" is, er, unexpectedly humorous and gives me a mental picture of someone being brought in under arrest for being a drag queen or something similar, or possibly turning into a can-can dancer.  Not quite the effect the author was going for ...

This is one reason why betas are a good thing, because they (hopefully) catch things like this.  And I don't care how good a writer you are, everyone does this sometimes (or has a computer do it for you when it autocorrects incorrectly and you don't notice ....)

What are your favorite (or least favorite) perennial typos/misspellings/homonym abuses/malapropisms?

Dear Yulegoat

DON'T PANIC.

This is a very long letter with lots of stuff, but DO NOT PANIC.  I'm actually fairly easy to please; I am very rarely disappointed with a ficathon story.  I write long and detailed Dear Author letters because I find such things helpful when I'm writing for other people; if you are like me, here you go!  If your style is different and a detailed letter makes you feel hemmed-in, feel free to do what works for you.

The most important thing for me in a fic is that the characters are well-written and recognizably themselves.  Even when I don't like a character, I don't go in for character-bashing.  If nothing else, if the rest of this letter is too much or my kinks just don't fit yours, just concentrate on writing a good story with everyone in character and good spelling and grammar and I will almost certainly love what you come up with.

One thing: I do have an embarrassment squick, which makes humor kind of hit-or-miss sometimes.  The kind of humor where someone does something embarrassing and the audience is laughing at them makes me uncomfortable because I identify too much with the person getting laughed at, so instead of being funny it is squicky.  On the other hand, the kind of humor where the audience is laughing with the characters I really enjoy.

( My generic preferences )

( Fandoms )