With a massive drive underway to wire up schools in the UK, there has been enormous demand for software to prevent children accessing pages on the internet that can warp their young minds. This has had an unfortunate impact on a web site maintained by University of Sterling lecturer John Higgins who offers help to teachers of English pronunciation. He provides complete lists of homophones (pairs of words that sound the same) and homographs (pairs of words that look the same). He complains in a letter to the Times, many teachers find his site blocked because the software identifies the suffix ‘homo’ to be a hazard to young minds.
