Send three-and-fourpence*
Some time ago I was struggling to understand why a book I was editing had so many homophone, or near-homophone, words, i.e., words which sounded like the right ones but were (perfectly spelt) wrong ones. Eventually I came across two entire homophone phrases, again perfectly spelt, which made no sense in the context when viewed as text, but when read aloud sounded correct. I finally ‘twigged’ that the manuscript was the output of a computerised dictation system, and asked the author to apply some basic quality control to it. I won’t embarrass him by quoting the examples here, but it’s an interesting syndrome, and if you come across it I may have saved you some head-scratching.