Hey! Get It Right, Can’t Ya?!
I think I know what my first published work is going to be. When I was 10, I started writing a Homonym Dictionary (they call them homophones now). You know what homonyms and homophones are (no, not the nicknames of openly gay individuals nor the earphones they wear with their portable CD players) — they’re words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. Words like their, they’re, there; hear, here; or two, too, to. I gave that project up when, in the sixth grade, they started hammering us with these confusing word-pairs. I figured that if everyone had this stuff pounded into them in school, no one would buy my book. I was wrong. A lot of the questions that the Grammar Guru receives are from people confused by similar-sounding words. I’ve addressed a lot of these words in this blog, and I want to cover a few more today.
A feint is a move in swordplay or other combat-oriented pursuits (including Chess), in which the person attempts to mislead his opponent into thinking he’s going to move one direction (or pursue a line of action), only to go the opposite direction. It’s a bluff, a diversionary tactic.
Faint can be to pass out or to be weak. The “faint of heart” are weak in the face of danger or ickiness. Women who wear tightly-laced corsets faint because they can’t breathe properly.
A leech is either a parasitic worm that sucks blood from its victim or an archaic term for a doctor (because they used to use leeches to bleed people).
To leach is to extract or draw out: salt pork leaches the poison from festering wounds. Nasty chemicals leach into the water supply and contaminate it.
To write is to put words down in permanent form, on paper or online.
A rite is a standardized and significant ceremony, often marking an achievement or a milestone in life. “Rite of passage” is the term used for the ceremony marking a person’s transition from childhood to adulthood. Religious ceremonies are called rites, as are the ceremonials of various societies (e.g., the Masons).
A right is a intangible concept expressing common consent that one has entitlement to a certain behaviour, action, or standard, and that such entitlement cannot be infringed upon without due process of law and clear reason for the abrogation of that entitlement. For example, in America, one has the right to keep and bear arms. That means that, so long as you don’t use your weapons for illegal purposes, you have the right to own a gun, and no one can take your gun away from you without proving that you have transgressed the law in using it. The “right of way” means that you are entitled to precedence in a traffic pattern; fire engines have the ultimate “right of way.”
Of course, right can also refer to a direction (the opposite of left) or to correctness (the opposite of wrong).
Check those homophones, y’all!
3 Comments
What if a business is established selling fishing tackle? Is that property then considered reel estate?
Sorry, just couldn’t help myself. Homophones are the building blocks of puns, wouldn’t you say?
Technically, a homonym has the same spelling but a different meaning and sometimes a different pronunciation. “The gray dove dove into the water.
A homophone is a word that is spelled differently, but pronounced the same. “I, too, went to town two times.”
Thanks for clearing that up, Gryphon! When I was in school, they were all called homonyms, and I’d never understood the reason for the name change. Now I see: it’s to make a distinction between things that sound the same and things that look the same.