June 12, 2013--Homographs and Heteronyms

Needing a break from the Patriot Act and the FISA court, I happily became obsessed with homographs--words that are spelled the same, pronounced the same, but have different meanings.

Words such as--

Bat
Bear
Change
Cool
Rock
Sign
Update

I have no idea how this popped into my head, but it did and I was grateful for it. I needed distractions.

Then, when thinking about homographs and why they even exist, I was at the same time drawn to heteronyms, hundreds of words that are spelled the same, have different meanings, but are pronounced differently.

For example--

Abuse
Address
Attribute
Bow
Can
Close
Convert
Retard
Tear
Wind

It would be easy for the English language to be "cleaned up" so there would be no more non-phonetic words such as though, trough, said, friend, guest, and again to madden poor spellers such as I. And, if we wanted, there would be no homographs or heteronyms. But our wonderful language is far from logical. Thus, no wonder so many native English speakers have trouble with spelling and grammar and why so many for whom English is not their first language have such difficulty learning it.

And this complexity does not even include the trove of idioms that enrich our language. Idioms whosee literal meanings have nothing apparent to do with their connotative meanings--

To have a chip on one's shoulder.
To rub someone the wrong way.
To get down to brass tacks.
To jump the gun.

I love these! Idioms are the most creative, most vivid, most hermetic manifestations of English and virtually every other language.

Who cares that to jump the gun is derived from the gunshot that is used to signal the start of foot races and to "jump" it means to get off to too quick a start, to an illegal start? The idiomatic meaning, not its track-and-field source, enriches our language and slips a bit of poetic mystery into even the most mundane prose.

I was an awful speller, always among the first to be publicly humiliated in elementary school spelling bees where I was unable to spell separate (I could never get all the e's and a's where they belonged) or cemetery (I always inserted an a somewhere) or surgeon (where I never got the sur quite right).

I still can't spell but thanks to SpellCheck I can get by and do not need the help of the Simplified Spelling Society's efforts.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw was devoted to this movement--he too was a notoriously poor speller. In fact, after he died, he bequeathed the bulk of his estate to it. The society's idea, and that of any number of other similar efforts, was to simplify written English using various phonetic alphabets, including some that add a dozen or so new letters to our existing 26 letter alphabet; or, to use the same kinds of symbols used in pronunciation dictionaries: for example, substitute kf for cough.

More radically, there is a Shavian phonetic alphabet that looks like this--



Perhaps these approaches would have served me well in 5th grade (though do not ask me to translate this illustration of how Shaw would have had us represent the English language); but looking back, leaning as early as the 5th grade to take a licking (idiom) in public was good training for adult work situations and now with SpellCheck . . .