Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/04/fun-and-helpful-blog-on-homoph.html
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Book $12, shipping $30 …
I’m going to treat this like my mattress and sleep on it.
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I read the headline that way too, and I thought “Well okay, but how is 800 pages on the Westboro Baptist Church going to be fun?”
Edited because auto correct is stupid.
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I feel like this is a classic example of completely unnecessary systemic inconvenience (in this case the phonetic bullshit salad that is the English language) creating “value” in the market. I like this book, I like the way it tackles the subject. But It tugs at my lizard brain that the value of it is created by something that could (read could not bc history) be avoided…
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I wonder which parts of the world struggle the most with the subtle differences between English homophones? I remember a Polish person telling me that it seems incredulous to them that English speakers can’t sort out their language properly so as to avoid this.
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If we fix English so that everything is spelled (spelt?) the way it sounds, that turns all homophones and homographs into homonyms and makes everything worse. This is why we can’t have nice words.
If this book stops internet posters from mixing up discreet/discrete, or diffuse/defuse, or using “lead” as the past tense of “to lead”, my lizard brain can take a nap (it’s a very pedantic lizard brain).
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No joke. I need this book, and English is my native language.
It’s too early in the morning here still for me, when I read the headline on it I totally read it as homophobes and was all “SAY WHAT?!”
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I’ll throw Mr. Worden a party with fireworks if the Internet learns how to spell “lose”.
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I feel like we’re just on the line between having enough homophones to be really frustrating, and not enough to become an essential part of the language/idioms/culture the way they are in, say, Chinese.
Also, I’d like to see this done for the auto-antonyms, too.
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which one is synonymous with arm twisting?
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