Way back when… I was taking a class in Artificial Intelligence as an emphasis in my degree program. Of course, back then, we were still struggling with the inability of natural language processing to distinguish between: “time flies like the wind” and “fruit flies like bananas.”

Oddly, while SyFy had already dealt with flies in transporter machines, fruit and wind were never broached. I do hope that’s been resolved.

My A.I. professor, whose first language was not English, gave us a speech one day about how appalled he was at the general level of spelling in our industry – specifically his University department. He was disgruntled with the high incidence of simple spelling and grammatical errors from people he considered academic and therefore setting of higher examples.

His explanation was anecdotal but insightful. He had entered the field of A.I. and after a number of years noticed in himself a decreased ability to quickly and correctly pull simple rules of spelling and grammar; they had been eroded and replaced with the language and syntax of programming. He surmised that there must be one part of the brain dedicated to language in general and filling it with new constructs was at the expense of the old.

Having said that, however, it’s always curious to me that some grade school basics still present themselves as constant problems. After tens of thousands of emails read in my career, the words that still seem to cause confusion are homonyms. [insert your own joke here.]

These are words that sound the same – but are NOT interchangeable – or at least not to professional consultants. Unfortunately, spell checkers will not typically find these for you – you have to make the effort yourself.

Here is a very short list of words I have collected over the years, which for whatever reason seem to still cause confusion:

• Bases, basis
• They’re, their, there.
• Then, than
• Your, you’re
• Of, off
• To, too (much), two
• Setting around, sitting around
• Here, hear, hair
• Bear, bare, beer
• Across, acrossed

As an IT professional, take the time to know these differences; writing professionally simply adds to your credibility.