Grammar Blogger Fired Over 'Homo' in 'Homophones'

Boss thought confused students would think of gay sex
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Suggested by Dr.Benway
Posted Jul 31, 2014 4:37 PM CDT
Grammar Blogger Fired Over 'Homo' in 'Homophones'
   (Shutterstock)

You've heard of homophobia. Now comes homophonia. The Salt Lake Tribune has the strange story of a social-media specialist who got fired after writing a blog post about homophones—the grammatical term referring to words that sound the same but are spelled differently, like too and two. It seems that his boss at a company that teaches English as a second language thought the topic sounded a little too controversial. "People at this level of English may see the 'homo' side and think it has something to do with gay sex," the boss at the Nomen Global Language Center in Provo tells the newspaper.

Tim Torkildson is now out of a job after three months, though it didn't sound like things were going so great before this incident. In another blog post, he quotes his boss, Clarke Woodger, as saying: “I’m letting you go because I can’t trust you. This blog about homophones was the last straw. Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality.” (The post has been deleted.) Woodger tells the Tribune that Torkildson simply wasn't very good at his job, and tended to "go off on tangents" in his writings. Still, the whole story reads like something out of the Onion, notes Business Insider. (More strange stuff stories.)

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