Shortly after moving into the first house I purchased, I was mixing samples of two different colored paints on a board to achieve the perfect shade of white for a touch-up spot on the wall. I stepped forward to apply it, paint in one hand, reaching for the ladder with the other and brush poised between my teeth. I tripped over the large wooden platform we’d just used to move some heavy furniture into the living room. Fortunately, I caught myself so I didn’t fall flat on my face, but the pointed brush handle poked the roof of my mouth. Ouch!
In other words, while mixing touch-up paints on my palette, I tripped over a pallet and injured my palate. Ouch…
And don’t get me started on my friend Rosemary’s boat, named after her favorite flower. She sailed it to catch some sturgeon in order to harvest their eggs for caviar, but she stood up too fast and tumbled over the side.
Yes, when she rose in The Rose while fishing for rows of roes, she fell overboard, so poor Ro’s day was ruined.
This is my subtle (as a submachine gun) way of announcing that our topic today, students, is homophones. You remember them: two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings: “allowed” and “aloud”or “I’ll” and “aisle”. And if you happen to have a British accent: “father” and “farther.”
Ah, the fond memory I have when my middle school English teacher introduced the term to titters of laughter at the sound of the new word: “homo-phone.” And our resident class bully — named Biff, of course — took the opportunity to display his limited acting chops and unlimited meanness by pantomiming the whole word, imitating some limp-wrister gabbing away on his telephone.
He had just captured my vote for “Most likely to fail in life after high school.” At our tenth high school reunion, I learned that he was our only classmate who had already been divorced twice. Clearly, he just hadn’t found the right man yet.
Recently, I stumbled on an abstract of a doctoral dissertation, written back in 1966, which boasted that the author had identified and catalogued 10,588 different homophones in our language. As Mr. T would have said, “I pity the fool” who did all that awful grunt work to tabulate each and every sound-alike in our language. Just the thought of such mind-numbing labor is too-to-two much for me.
But it did get me thinking about whether all languages have words that sound the same but have different meanings. First, I searched online for “homophones in English” and discovered that the number is actually only 10,473, not the 10,588 that the doctoral drone had calculated. Oh, that “poor fool” spending all those countless hours, and now Professor Google can tell him, in less than a second, that he needn’t have bothered.
I did discover that all languages have homophones but that Mandarin Chinese has by far the most, perhaps almost 18,000. I found the reason fascinating (“yeah, YOU would..” I hear you thinking). It turns out that almost all Mandarin characters have single-syllable pronunciations. This fact reduces the number of sounds in their spoken language, leading to multiple same-sounding words.
For example, their sound for “husband” and “laborer” is the same. This fact is behind many jokes in Beijing between spouses, with Chinese wives insisting that their shared language demands that their husbands perform all sorts of chores for them. Not to be outdone, English-speaking wives use a different but equally droll homophone phenomenon when they turn “honeydew” into the demand: “Honey—do”. One is a pleasant fruit, the other an unpleasant home repair list.
Remember Rosemary’s boat? Well, LeRoy and I fantasized about owning our own spectacular one. We knew we could never own a luxury liner to sail the world, but he suggested that if we ever did, we should have our first initials embossed on its hull. I agreed and, wanting to steal more of the limelight, I told him we must call our fantasy frigate “THE L. E. YACHT”, indicating both a deluxe cruiser and your “homophonic” essayist.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here