English is a crazy language. I know German pretty well, I can read Spanish, and I must say, as much as I love to read and write the English language, German and Spanish are far more logical and consistent—thus predictable—than English is.
Take, for instance, spelling and pronunciation. You don’t know how to spell or pronounce a word in English until you’ve seen it spelled and heard it pronounced. There’s no rhyme or reason to it; no pattern; no theory. It’s all across the board and off the board—on the floor, as it were.
And so it’s not unusual (Tom Jones!) when people get confused with words like their, there, and they’re. They are homonyms (they sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different definitions). Or should I say, “They’re homonyms…”?
But which is which? I’ve noticed that many people have a serious problem with these three homonyms.
So here are a few examples, where the meaning of these homonyms should be obvious, to straighten out the knotty (naughty?) problem:
A Duck-billed Platypus is over there.
Their Duck-billed Platypus has a poison claw.
They’re going to name their Duck-billed Platypus “Wildpinkler.”
You could say of people playing charades yonder:
There they’re their own thespians. (say that 31.4 times fast, and you’ll be deserving of a piece of pi)
…Or of people with orthographic difficulties:
Their Theres are misspelled as “They’re”
So “Their” is possessive; “There” denotes direction; and “They’re” is a contraction (“They are”).
UPDATE: I came across a great example of this in the book English Grammar: 100 Tragically Common Mistakes:
They’re going to set the candy right there in front of their kids!
They’re going to decide, right there, to regret their decision.