English-language homonyms are every copy editor’s cross to bare. Or is it “cross to bear?” It’s easy for a careless writer to confuse words like that, and even professional writers often make homonym crossover errors in their rough drafts.
Such mistakes are even more commonplace on the Internet, where people are more likely to post off-the-cuff writings without editorial oversight. And in the age of automatic search alerts and automated Twitter accounts, it’s easy to scour new postings and send instant admonishments to anyone confusing “bear” and “bare” in their writing … or is it?
A few weeks ago, the Daily Dot wrote about @StealthMountain, a Twitter account sending robo-messages to any Twitterer who incorrectly writes “sneak peak” in lieu of “sneak peek.”
That, presumably, required a fairly simple search algorithm: barring the incredibly unlikely scenario that a writer is talking about a sneaky mountain, any English-language use of the phrase “sneak peak” is incorrect.
It may have been a little more difficult for Helpful Bear to set up his new Twitter account, @helpfulbear, which seeks to do for “bear/bare” mistakes what @StealthMountain does for sneak peaks. But bear and bare are trickier: unlike “peak” and “peek,” each spelling has multiple meanings depending on the context. It’s even correct to say “Americans have the right to bear arms and bare arms in public, while Saudi Arabians have neither.”
But @helpfulbear isn’t trying to cover every possible misuse of bear or bare; the automated responses focus on instances where people say “bare with me” or “bare in mind” (which are correct only if the writer’s either getting naked or thinking about being so).
That probably wasn’t the case with someone identifying as Jan Brady, who tweets as @AhDiosMio. When she wrote “I jump from topic to topic. Bare with me,” @helpfulbear sent her a standard response: “I think you mean ‘bear with me’.” Brady responded: “naw, i had the correct form of ‘bare’ lmao. but thanks.”
Given @helpfulbear’s concern with linguistic propriety, it’s worth mentioning that every single tweet the account has sent contains a punctuation error. When it writes, “I think you mean ‘bear with me’” or “I think you mean ‘bear in mind,’” the relevant phrases are set apart in single quotation marks. This violates the punctuation rules of standard American English, which says that quotes are to be set off with double quotation marks unless it’s a subquote contained within a larger quote, as demonstrated in the following example:
Jennifer, the Daily Dot writer, said, “I wanted to send @helpfulbear a Tweet pointing out his consistent punctuation errors, but my editor told me, ‘No, sending unsolicited corrections to strangers is kind of a jerkwad thing to do.’”