View from the North 40: You just never know what'll get a laugh

I’m calling it a quirk, but if I were hard-pressed to be honest about it, I’d have to admit that it’s a failing or a weakness or a glitch, even, in my brain. I suffer from homophonia.

That’s not a word. I just made it up.

I started with a real word, though: homophone, which describes how words can sound the same, or nearly the same, but be spelled differently and have completely different meanings.

I occasionally mix up my homophones, usually when I’m tired or in a hurry, and the other day when I was both I wrote that I was digging a “mote,” which is a tiny speck of something. I meant that I was digging a “moat,” y’know, a ditch or a trench. That would make sense because it would be patently ridiculous to think I was digging a speck of dust, unless it was in my eye — but I was using a shovel and a spud bar, so go ahead and imagine that happening.

Some of the most common homophones include their, they’re and their; your and you’re, but we could add yore, also, which brings us to too, to and two; hear and here; boarder and border; its and it’s; and so on. You get the gist of problem.

Back when I was teaching I had developed a professional friendship with an instructor from another college who generously shared his wisdom from his years teaching. One day, I quickly wrote an email response to him and came back later to find that he responded by telling me that I had used the wrong form of “to.”

At this point in our acquaintance I had assumed that we were beyond such nitpickediness (I just made up that version of nitpick, so be careful about flashing that around in public), so my response was, um, probably easier to demonstrate than explain. It went something like:

“I yam sari ewe had two sea that. Eye should halve re-red my e-male bee-four Aye scent it. Weir Stihl, oh, Kay?”

This went on for about a half of a page.

It signaled the end of our professional friendship, and I never heard from him again.

I, on the other hand, laughed for two days. It was awesome — dare I say brilliant.

There in lies one of my problems. Sure I want my work to be right, but I never know when the wrong word is just going to tempt me to leave it be.

“He started his business when he was quite young” is just one letter away from being “He started his bustiness when he was quite young.”

You see what happened there? With just one small “T” added, a story about a business man became a story about a guy who grew a bust line, y’know, man-cans.

The other day someone dropped the “E” from Butte. Sure, dropping a letter is funny when it happens to Butte because, well, it’s Butte, duh, but guess what happens when you drop a letter from Public Health. Then I’m just one letter away from a professional disaster and laughing my way to job service in search of new gainful employment.

Still, might be worth it in the right situation.

——

Sum thymes ewe half to say, “Com down, com down. Its awl, oh, Kay,” at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.