From The Guardian Weekly, vol 162, no 1 (Thursday December 30 1999 to Wednesday January 9 2000)
HTML formatting by David Pierce
Ian Mayes, readers' editor of the Guardian, whose job it is to respond to readers' complaints, sets a test
It is time for the readers' editor's first test. It is based on homophones or homonyms (not, as someone mistakenly referred to them, homophobes).
A homophone - I quote from Collins Millennium dictionary - is "one of a group of words pronounced in the same way but differing in meaning or spelling or both, as for example bear and bare".
Postgraduate students of journalism at the City University in London, to whom I gave a recent talk , had the test sprung on them. They were given a little more than five minutes to do it. In fact they were shown only the first 17 of the 20 you see here. Almost 120 students handed their papers in. Only eight students got them all right. About 30 got nearly all of them right (just one or two wrong).
Give yourself one mark for identifying the wrongly used word and another for getting the word that should have been used, making a possible total of 40 marks. Journalists and others with some professional interest in English, take five minutes. Others, a maximum of 10 (or perhaps that should be the other way round).
How did you do? 40 excellent; 35-39 very good; 30-34 not bad; less than 30: Are you by any chance working for the Guardian? I think we should be tolled.
The ones that proved most difficult for the students were 3 and 16; and the one that they nearly all got was 14.
Before anyone gets too smug, remember that here we have narrowed down the area of search to a few words and told you what you are looking for. These ubiquitous little chaps are as much a product of haste as of ignorance. Their occurrence is not in itself an indication of the decline in the standards of English for which the vigilant Guardian reader is always on the lookout.
The Guardian Weekly 30-12-1999, page 16