English spelling can be so delightfully confusing. Fare/fair also came up in this thread.

For anyone who mixed them up, no harm, no foul! (And certainly no fowl play.)

Of course everyone knows what you meant, and that's what really counts. If you do want to remember the "correct" spelling, I wonder if this will help?

"It's only fair to pay your fare. And please don't pull the emergency brake, so your fellow passengers' bones don't break."

I take it you already know

Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you,

On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,

To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word

That looks like beard and sounds like bird,

And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -

For goodness sake don't call it deed!

Watch out for meat and great and threat

(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother,

Nor both in bother, broth in brother,

And here is not a match for there

Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,

And then there's dose and rose and lose -

Just look them up - and goose and choose,

And cork and work and card and ward,

And font and front and word and sword,

And do and go and thwart and cart -

Come, come, I've hardly made a start!

A dreadful language? Man alive! I'd mastered it when I was five!

A similar but longer poem ("The Chaos") can be found here: http://ncf.idallen.com/TheChaosPRETTY.pdf

This version has IPA included, in case anyone knows IPA better than English and wants to try to follow along.

I opened that link and was going to comment on the use of IPA - because in the first line I noticed it was using the British pronunciation, 'kriːʧə, rather than the North American pronunciation, 'kriːʧɚ. But in double checking myself, I found something more interesting - the wikipedia article [1] on R-coloured vowels (like the sound at the end of creature, that I was talking about). I thought I was pronouncing the r consonant separately, but instead it's just changing the vowel sound, which is linguistically kind of rare. Neat!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel

The Economist has this delightful article [1] about the history of some words that look like there should share common roots, but don't.

Examples from the article: the chess pawn and 'to pawn', Repair (to fix) and repair (as in “let’s repair to the smoking room”), Isle and island. All descend from different root languages with different meanings.

[1] https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/05/11/words-li...

Don't forget fayre. "A fair fare for the fayre." is an acceptable sentence.

Why didn't the editor give in to the temptation of a title like "Someone in New York is pulling emergency brakes, breaking subway commutes"?

Also, "fare", not "fare"

> Also, "fare", not "fare"

I got a chuckle out of that, so I hope you will understand that I mean this only in good humor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law