Homophones: A play on words that never stops

Do you bare or bear a resemblance to your father?

Have you heard the one about the bicycle that couldn’t stand on its own because it was two-tired?

Or the one about the local Board of Education that finally realized the lowest grades belonged to students bored of education?

You are not likely to find a beech sprouting on a Mississippi Coast beach.

Welcome to the world of homophones.

To remain sane after hearing about his dismissal, the bank teller headed to Back Bay with his seine to catch mullet. Thinking about his wife, he admitted to himself he did not want to tell her.

Then, when the teller tried to wade into the water, he realized his heavy cotton pants weighed too much. He decided not to brood so he headed home and brewed a batch of beer.

Homophones

Figured it out yet?

Did you hear about the Coast sportsman who dropped his lucky golf tee at Gulf Hills as he reached for his glass of tea.

As for me, when I spotted my first gray hair, I thought I’d dyed. Warning: I whine when I can’t find my favorite white wine.

Defined

A homophone is a word or words pronounced the same as another word or words but different in meaning and spelling. It is a form of a homonym. Among the examples above are brood/brewed, tee/tea, dyed/died, wade/weighed and beech/beach.

Verbally, homophones are lost on the ear but when written down, they are likely to bring smiles or wrinkled brows, maybe even an English lesson or two.

Did Biloxi recently pour or pore over the minutes of long-ago City Council meetings to learn how Martin Luther King Day became Great Americans Day?

The word would be “pore,” to study with great attention. But the national media attention may still be causing sweat to pour off city brows.

Editing revelations

I got stuck on homophones last week when I was editing my latest column and stumbled over the use of bear vs. bare. The answer to that first question is “bear a resemblance.”

Homophones can be written on purpose, as creative humor or puns to deceive readers, be it in poetry, headlines, rhymes or creative writing. But lots of times, a glaring homophone is a mistake — a misspelling, a confusion of definitions, a computer spellchecker run amok or simply ignorance.

No finger-pointing

I’m not one to point fingers. In more than 40 years of writing I have to my credit too many published unintentional homophones that slipped past editors. Or should that be “passed” editors?

Anyway, in our American language the possibilities for word mix-ups are endless. One fresh one for the lexicon is when then-President-elect Donald Trump tweeted about “an unpresidented act” concerning China and a U.S. drone. Some label his tweet mistake a Freudian slip as much as a misspelling of “unprecedented.”

Trump’s goof and my stumble over bare/bear set the brain cogwheel into motion to create my own list of homophones.

To cut down on the number of possibilities, I limited them to words that could be used in our coastal region.

Here’s a few that will work on the Coast:

Bait/bate — After he baited the hook he waited with bated breath for a fish to bite the bait.

Cache/cash — No cash will be found in the pirate cache suspected to be buried on Deer Island.

Seller/cellar — Few house sellers on the Coast could advertise a cellar.

Levy/levee — Should New Orleans find a way to levy a tax to pay for a new levee?

Ate/eight — He ate eight pounds of boiled crawfish.

Chilly/chili — It’s rarely chilly enough on the Coast to think about cooking a pot of chili.

As you go about your day, grab a notepad or open the note app on your smart phone, and begin jotting down homophones. Make this a day of racking/wracking your brain.

This story was originally published February 26, 2017 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Homophones: A play on words that never stops."