February 10, 2015--Latest Homograph

Reading about the Pax Romana early yesterday morning in David Abulafia's The Great Sea, I came across, for me, a new homograph--two words with different meanings and pronunciations but spelled the same way.

Refuse as in to turn something down and refuse as trash, something to throw away.

Etymologically, they come from similar Old French sources--

Refuser, in the case of the verb refuse meaning to reject, literally to avoid; and with the homograph noun pair refuse or trash, etymologically from refus, meaning waste product.

As I have wondered here in the past, how puzzling, how strange, how truly unnecessary that with English so rich with more than 1,025,109 words, and new ones being created every day, that we have any homographs at all. Why not have refuse just mean to turn something down and another word entirely to be a synonym for trash. Say a portmanteau word such as refrash?

But there could be a problem with that since when googling refrash this came up--

Mooning with refrash shout out to Refrash of Nebula

Whatever this means. I think perhaps something having to do with an electronic game. But you get my point.

I do, though, have a speculation as to why we still have homographs.

The Old French etymological roots of refuse/refuse go back to the 14th century when our language was a lot less nuanced and so, at that time, for the sake of efficiency, and since people were busy just trying to survive, there were many homonyms, homophones, and homographs. Over time, as living conditions improved, English filled out exponentially (thanks in substantial part to Shakespeare who was both a wordsmith and multi-thousand word-creator), it would have been easy to clean this up. But English speakers decided not to do so.

Perhaps to leave traces of where we have been as a people, how much we "advanced," and how much ambiguity and mystery we wanted to retain in our language. Linguistic footprints in our amazing English, which, when you think about it, is a magical collective creation. As are all the world's other 7,000 extant languages.

There is no organization, business, or government entity whose job it is to generate new words in response to changing circumstances. Even in language-obsessed France!

We all pitch in from IT entrepreneurs to hip-hop artists to kids on the street.

September 30, 2014--Homographs

I'm the world's worst spella but love word games and langauge oddities.

A longtime favorite is idioms. Not so much what they metaphorically mean but their literal meanings and orijins. From time to time I've written about them here.

But among my favorite language quirks are homographs, words that are spelled the same but have more than one meaning--words such as bear/bear; left/left; and, one of my favrites, skate/skate/skate.

Unlike these, a homograph that is pronounced diferently is a heteronym--words such as wound (meaning wound up) and wound (a cut) that are spelled the same way, but pronounced differently and have different meanings.

I haven't a clue as to why English and a few other langages include homographs. It would be easy to have wound (wound up) and wooned (a cut), but instead we have wound and wound. Maybe it's for the sake of efficiency. Who knows.

Thus learning a language with lots of idioms and homographs is extra hard. What would a native French speaker make of match (to light a cigarette) and match (to make a pair)? Or rock (as in a stone) and rock (as in a cradle) or even rock (as in music)? All are not just homographs but homonyms because they are pronownced the same way. Get it?

And when it comes to learning or understanding idioms what is that same French speeker to make of "Bring home the bacon" or "Hide one's light under a bushel"?

Or, for that matter, what would an English speaker struggling to learn French think about Appeler un chat un chat? Literally, to call a cat a cat, which colloquially means something similar to the English idiom "to call a spade a spade." Or Au pif? Literally, "at the nose," meaning a general estimate.

There are also French homographs. Mainly as a result of words that are graphically the same but have accents in different locations. For example--

arriéré--overdue or backward
arrière--rear or aft

jeune--young
jeûne--fasting

marche--walking 
marché--market

Then, of course, there are the Chinese homographs--

便宜  (pián yi)--which as an adjective means cheap or inexpensive; while as a noun it means something undeserved that you're not supposed to get; and then as a verb it means to benefit.

This is about as far as I can take you. For other Chinese homographs you're on your own.

Though I can tell you about the meanings of my newest favorite homograph--minute and minute with the first a measure of time and minute, with the "i" pronounced differently and accent on ute, meaning tiny. I especialy like the relation between the too--in the largher scheme of things, a minute realy is minute.

August 8, 2014--Best Of Behind: Asiento Inodoro

This tongue-in-cheek piece is from September 29, 2011:

At the risk of alienating my progressive friends, I need to make a confession.

Yesterday, we went to Lowe's to buy a new toilet seat. This should have been routine enough, but what we were shopping for is not the subject of the confession.

What is is how much of everything in that huge barn of a store was in Spanish.

It made me understand the causes for some of the clamor on the part of the political right to pass a constitutional amendment to make English the "official" language of the United States.

Of course that's ridiculous--English already is our national language and doesn't need an amendment to affirm it.

But my confession is that I kind of understand the chauvinistic impulse.

All the signage was bilingual, from the welcome at the entrance, to the labels on all the aisles, to the product packaging itself. Everything in the store was equally in English and Spanish. Even directions to the water fountains. And this is up in Maine where few Latinos are in residence.

Following those parts of the signs that were in English, we found our way to the Bathroom/Baño aisle and then located the toilet seat/asiento del inodoro display. After careful consideration we were attracted to an American Standard HOMESTEAD toilet seat with something called an "EVERCLEAN surface." It was the most expensive available, nearly twice as much as the next-most-costly, and we assumed that might have to do with the EVERCLEANness since it was the only one that promised to be "permanently" clean and, we assumed, hygienic.

Rona, especially, is interested in everything that is or purports to be hygienic and so the price--$33.00--didn't deter us. But we did want to know more about this EVERCLEAN business--

For example, was the seat made and painted in China? We found that of course it was. Did this then perhaps mean there might be something toxic about the painted surface? Like so many toys and dishes made in China?

Hygiene is one thing; having a toxic tush another.

So we needed to know more. And we did, with the Spanish explanation more helpful than the English. I quote:

Exclusiva superficie antimicrobiana a base de plata EverClean. Inhibe en forma permanente el crecimiento de bacterias que causan manchas y malos olores, moho y hongos. La superficie EverClean no protege contra enfermedades provocadas por bacterias.

Excelente, no? Rona was very pleased about the moho y hongos part as she hates mold and mildew.
I confess to having been discombobulated by the whole thing and was becoming increasingly conflicted about my support for MoveOn.org.

What, I thought, will I say to my Delray Beach friend, Harvey, when I see him in a few months. When he reads this he'll think I've come over to the other side and take delight in exposing my confusion--read flip-flopping. My only counter will be that his candidates invented flip-flopping. Think Mitt Romney.
I suppose it wouldn't help to note that the HOMESTEAD EVERCLEAN box also includes French.

EverClean à base d'argent, antimicrobien, exclusif. Empêche, de maniere permanente . . .

This is not helpful. Politically helpful. It will only make Harvey crazier. Things French are not among his favorites.