Pour Over vs. Pore Over

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Morgan from Phoenix. How are you?

Hi, Morgan. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

So I’m a plant engineer and I end up working with a lot of really smart people, you know, like engineers and technicians and operators.

But I’ve found that like all of these technical people, regardless of their age or area of expertise, like have really poor spelling skills and often have what I call like homophonic confusion.

So I end up doing a lot of wordsmithing when I’m reviewing their documents, and it ends up being kind of my legacy in a way.

However, I sent an email recently where I said I would pore over a document, P-O-U-R.

And someone replied and used pore, P-O-R-E, in the same context in response.

And I realized I didn’t know which one was correct.

And, you know, I might have been a little bit called out on that.

So I’m wondering which is the correct one.

It’s hard when you’ve been promoted kind of indirectly as the office language maven, you know, informally.

Yeah, no pressure there.

And you fall down, right?

Yeah.

And it happens everywhere.

There’s always that person who is unofficially, sometimes officially, the one that people kind of say, can you look at this?

This is really important.

So you’re worried that you confused your poor and your poor.

Yes, which isn’t a big deal.

But like you said, for me, it is a big deal sometimes.

Because the way I tried to approach it was I tried to think of, well, P-O-U-R.

You’re really pouring yourself into it physically.

And then on the other hand, you have P-O-R-E, something very small and detailed.

So I’m like, oh, I could see how either of these make sense.

But that’s not really how language works all the time.

You’re right about that’s not how language works, Morgan.

And the truth is that the correct word to use in those situations is P-O-R-E, pour over something.

Don’t really know the origin of pour in that sense, P-O-R-E.

But it goes back to the early 13th century, a word that means to gaze intently or look really closely at something.

But you make a good case for why you would mistake it as P-O-U-R.

You know, you’re pouring your attention.

You’re pouring your mind out over that page.

So the homophone does make sense.

And people have been confusing it for centuries.

Right, Grant?

Yeah, yeah.

I found it in a Derbyshire, England newspaper in 1770, a line about a gentleman in a clergyman’s frock pouring over a file of country papers.

Well, maybe he was.

Do you think?

No, it’s clear they meant the P-O-R-E.

But again and again throughout the centuries, you can find people making the same mistake, Morgan.

So don’t feel bad.

Good to know I’m not alone.

So it sounds like maybe you have a rival maven or something there.

I believe I do.

And you know what?

I’m happy to pass that baton as soon as they prove they are worthy.

That could be only one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, maybe it’s not a rival.

Maybe it’s a fellow word nerd.

There we go.

I would like to think so because some of these guys, I’ll tell you what, they spell like a horse.

Just like two hooves on the keyboard.

I don’t know what’s going on over there half the time.

Well, we all have our strengths and we all have our weaknesses.

And I hope that, I don’t know what your plant makes and does, but hopefully they’re good at the rest of their job.

Oh, absolutely.

I think it’s kind of a little bit of a trade-off.

I think, you know, they can’t be good at everything.

It’s just interesting how they seem to have this in common, and I don’t.

So maybe it’s just a little bit of jealousy in that regard.

That’s great.

Morgan, thanks so much.

Bet you’ll never spell this wrong again, right?

Oh, absolutely not.

I’ve learned my lesson.

Thank you so much for your help and for being just an absolute source of wholesome entertainment and recreational education for so many people.

We just love you.

Oh, thank you very much.

Morgan.

Take care of yourself.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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