Couple kisses for a change

A couple kissing at the altar is hardly news. But kissing at the change? That doesn’t even make sense. But when you’re reading Yahoo! Shine, homophonous confusion is hardly new:

Jennifer Aniston: Please don’t change

Ms. Aniston apparently isn’t in a hurry to change, according to this Yahoo! Shine article:

But the writer of the article was apparently in a rush when she wrote alter instead of altar, omitted the commas around however, shortened wanted to want, and used texting shorthand for with.

Altering the meaning

Replacing the word alter with its homophone (altar) would correct one problem with this commentary from Yahoo! Movies:

But even with that correction, I’d still be trying to interpret the first sentence. Does Mr. DePalma worship more at the altar of Hitch than he worships at the altar of other filmmakers? Or does he worship at Hitch’s altar more than other filmmakers worship at Hitch’s altar? Hmmmm. What do you think?

Altering the meaning

Yahoo! Shine, a bright star in Yahoo!’s galaxy of websites, has lots and lots of articles. One article about homosexual weddings contained a particularly apt typo (or wrong word). Perhaps it’s only fitting that a homophone would creep into an article about same-sex marriages:

No doubt the author knows the difference between alter (to change) and altar (where these folks were tying the not knot). But when two words sound the same, are spelled differently, and have different meanings, it’s just too easy to use the wrong one.