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Grandpa Reminisces about Homonyms He’s Crossed
Ever start thinking about a subject and have your brain reply to a thought with an eyeroll and, “Yes, Grandpa, you have told us about that before.” I was thinking about homonyms, never mind why, and thinking how they must be the bane of most writers’ existences. They are certainly mine.
Now, everyone who writes knows to watch for the common combinations. They’re the ones people get berated for most often on Farcebook and Twender. You know the ones: they’re/there/their and your/you’re/yore. (In days or you’re we used that word a lot.) But there are so many more homonyms that writers stumble over. It’s (ooh, another pair: its/it’s) just the way the brain works while we are composing a bit of text. Once we learn to type at a decent speed, the brain starts to go on semi-automatic. Pull the trigger by thinking of a word and the hands type it out. Or they type something like the word out. Usually it is a homophone.
Homonyms come in two types: homophones and homographs. (“Yes, Grandpa, we know.”) Homophones sound alike, but are spelled differently, like the metal “lead” and the action an army officer might do in the past (passed?) tense, “led.” That is opposed to homographs, which are spelled the same, but are pronounced differently. But what really can drive a writer to drink is the homophones that have homographs and vice versa. Like “read” and “read.” These two words are pronounced just like “reed” and “red.” And then there is the truly dreaded combination of desserts/deserts. Desert is actually a pair (or technically a quadruplet) of homographs. There are two related words that have the first syllable accented, such as the Gobi Desert, and there are two words that have the second syllable accented, meaning either one’s deserved reward (just deserts) or the action of getting out of the area and leaving your buds to face the music without you. Then there is the treat we have after a meal, which is spelled “dessert,” but pronounced like the latter pair of “deserts.”
Some of my favorite things that I discovered to my horror that my brain and fingers have misaligned on were typing “clamor” when I meant “clamber” and “climate” when I meant “climb it.” To be fair, the ladder* (heh, heh) was during the Great Climate Hoax of the Twenty-First Century when we heard and saw that word, climate, every day multiple times per day. Have I ever mentioned that before? (“Yes, Grandpa.”)
What are your most troublesome sets of homophones?
* Note to Editors: If you correct this spelling, the joke goes away. Don’t be that editor.
Published in Group Writing
∃ a brain glitch?
Is that some kind of weird animal called an aye-aye? They need to go back ware they came from.
I hear they do something like that in North Korea, except you aren’t dead when it starts.
Yes. It’s a type of lemur from Madagascar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aye-aye
Good catch, ‘hant.
Conscience and conscious . . .
The big problem there is that autocomplete always guesses wrong.
But important. Don’t misunderestimate it.
I never err.
Autocorrect, however, is a veritable fount of mistakes.
That’s a malaprop: getting the wrong word, usually one with a similar sound.
If only it had its own consciousness.
Mrs. Malaprop would be so proud, were she not fictional.
I have autocomplete and spelling/grammar checker turned off on all my devices . . .
Of course, that one was intentional.
Which are not only homonyms, but can be antonyms as well.
Good one!
Of course those are the only kind I ever do since I never make misteaks.
There is another term out there: contranym (or contronym). It can also be known as an auto-antonym. In other words, a word that can be its own opposite. Sanction can mean to permit or to penalize.
And handicap can be a disadvantage or an advantage. Boy howdy I’m sure glad I don’t have to learn English as a foreign language. I had a French friend in college who used to moan every day about why you didn’t pronounce through, enough, and thought the same way etc.
Barack Obama weighing in here – corps and corpse.
There was a wonderful word smith who was sometimes published in the Reader’s Digest. He would write articles about the word craziness. Things like if “you put goods to be delivered in a car, you call it a shipment, but if you put it in a ship, it is cargo.” He could go on in that vein for two full pages.
I really wish I could remember his name.
Like we park in the driveway and drive on the parkway….
Oh, my former boss, a very astute, bright, and wise man, was the king of malapropisms. A couple of my favorites: “come to futrition [fruition]” and “the crust [crux] of the matter.”
Then, there is the phrase I’ve adopted as my own: “Crimenutely!”
My daily prayer: Please Lord, before I die, let every pontificator on the internet learn the difference between the words ‘regime’ and ‘regimen’. The misuse drives me crazy. I can forgive using decimate for devastate but really how can someone not know what is a regime and what is a regimen? Do these people not have editors?
Mrs. She, I’m sorry to say that you no longer have a proprietary use of “crimeutely” (and its variants). I own it and you will have to ask my permission if you wish to use it. But I’m a reasonable man: 10 cents per use, unless you’re using it ironically. Then it’s 50 cents.
They are fewer on the Internet than they should be.
Dear Arahant:
TL;DR
But you knew that…..
Or can lead from one to the other. Raise the army to raze the city.
The OP title led me to wonder if this is some kind of breeding program to produce an F1 hybrid in response to the question, “What do you get when you cross a homonym with an antonym?”
We may have our answer.