Homography and Heteronyms for the English Lover

Compliments of my good friend Chip...an English major, surprise, surprise! 

Homographs are words of like spelling but with more than one meaning. A homograph that is also pronounced differently is a heteronym. You think English is easy?

   

1)  The bandage was wound around the wound.

 

2)  The farm was used to produce produce.

 

3)  The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

 

4)  We must polish the Polish furniture..

 

5)  He could lead if he would get the lead out.

 

6)  The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

 

7)  Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.  

 

8)  A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

 

9)  When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

 

10)  I did not object to the object.  

 

11)  The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

 

12)  There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

 

13)  They were too close to the door to close it.

 

14)  The buck does funny things when the does are present. 

 

15)  A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

 

16)  To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

 

17)  The wind was too strong for me to wind the sail.

 

18)  Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.

 

19)  I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

 

20)  How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

 

 

Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

 

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, two geese. So one moose, two meese? One index, two indices?  Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call  it?

 

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should  be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship?  Have noses that run and feet that smell?

 

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which  your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling  it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on.

 

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars  are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are  invisible.

 

PS.  - Why doesn't 'Buick' rhyme with 'quick'?

 

 

You lovers of the English language might enjoy this.

 

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is 'UP.'

 

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?

 

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP?

 

Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write   UP a report?

 

We call UP our friends.

 

And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver; we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen.

 

We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.

 

At other times the little word has real special meaning.

 

People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP   excuses.

 

To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed UP   is special.

 

A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

 

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

 

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

 

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary.

 

In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.

 

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used.

 

It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP , you  may wind UP with  a hundred or more.

 

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP.

 

When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.

 

When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.

 

When it doesn't rain for a while, things dry UP.

 

One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so.......it is time to shut UP !

Simple Beauty

Lynchburg Letter for Life...And For A Death

Kudos to the Lynchburg News and Advance for, after nineteen days since submission, finally printing my recent letter to the editor.

It was a prolife piece. I wrote it in response to a horrifying case in nearby Bedford, wherein a mother strangled her two year-old son. The week that followed the case, all I heard was how unbelievably despicable and wicked the mother must be, how the parents waited four hours before calling the authorities, because they were operating a meth lab, how grieved folks were for this inconceivable loss, and so on. We, too, grieved, prayed, and prayed for the family.

Throughout that week, though, I couldn’t help but wonder at the fact that, despite everyone’s conscience functioning properly and all having a due sense of the situation’s gravity and depravity, all the same folks—many of whom I’ve shared fetal models and post-abortive pictures with—go day (3,000 aborted) after day (another 3,000) after day (yet another 3,000) without so much as casual concern for the thousands of abortions committed each day in America.

So, finding few redeemable aspect to dear little Jordan Smith’s murder, and being disgusted by my culture’s (and church’s) apathy toward abortion victims, I felt that I could honor baby Jordan by allowing his death to (God please!) help possibly save some lives of his little preborn fellows by means of this letter.

Machen on Apologetics

“In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of science, by trying to bribe off the enemy by those concessions which the enemy most desires, the apologist has really abandoned what he started out to defend...The things that are sometimes thought to be hardest to defend are also the things that are most worth defending."

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1923) pp. 7-8.

Making the Prolife Case: The Deadbeat Mom Argument

Here is a recent letter, I (Kevin) had published in the Bedford Bulletin earlier this month. Every literate Christian can do something about the American genocide, abortion, even if it is simply writing a short letter to the editor of his local paper. This letter is an illustration of what Israel and I call the Deadbeat Mom Argument, which Israel basically formulated a couple of months ago, during some table talkin'. 

Be creative, be logically consistent, and be bold. Christ, who is Truth, is on our side, which makes the prolife position one of the easiest to communicate and defend. Regardless of what you do for the cause, do something--like 3,000 helpless, voiceless lives a day depend on it, because they do!

____________________________

Imagine that Bob’s loose behavior resulted in getting a woman pregnant. Mary hadn’t contacted Bob since that one-night encounter. She called Bob to notify him of his responsibilities toward their then-forming child. Bob refused.

Later, Bob received a certified letter; the state demanded Bob take responsibility for his child. Suffering garnishment, Bob changed careers, doing cash-only jobs to avoid having his parental arrearage forcibly taken. Bob was then notified that his income tax refund check would go to Mary and the child. After $5,000 in arrears, Bob looks forward to prison. Meantime, he enjoys his picture being on the state’s “Most Wanted Deadbeat” list.

Most share in common one thing concerning Bobs: We love to loathe them. We consider them losers, irresponsible, immoral, shameful “deadbeats.” This valuation is often well-justified. Our legal system agrees and acts. Parents are morally and legally obligated to care for their children. From child-like intuition to jurisprudential scholarship, we know Bob is wrong.

How about when women decide they don’t want to be mothers? Like Bob, Mary could make her decision the moment she discovers she’s a parent. We’ve been conditioned to celebrate Mary’s decision as a constitutional right to privacy and personal autonomy; we condemn Bob for the same act. Since 1973, over 53,000,000 of these decisions have been made—abortion. The pro-abortion propagandists have driven culture to the absolute dereliction of all moral and rational sense, woefully idiocy. We’ve come to “call evil (Bob’s decision) good (Mary’s decision), and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20).

Abortion Laws and Our Jurisprudential Duplicity

Last Easter, Remee Lee, a young Florida woman, woke up lying in a pool of blood.  John Welden, Lee’s 28 year old boyfriend, decided he didn’t want to be a father. Welden, whose father was Lee’s OBGYN, told her that her tests discovered an infection. Welden falsified an amoxicillin prescription, used an orange Rx bottle, and filled the bottle with Misoprostol, a drug in the RU-486 abortion regimen. One dose of the 200 micrograms of Misoprostol induced fatal uterine contractions, which aborted the baby.

The case was heard by U.S. District Court Judge Lazzara. Under the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act, Weldon could’ve faced a life sentence for first-degree murder. A plea bargain grossly reduced his charges. On January 10 Welden was sentenced to nearly 14 years. Judge Lazzara concluded, “[Welden] committed an evil act...he’s going to have to pay the consequences.”

In Welden’s, the father’s, case abortion is seen for what it is, “an evil act,” killing a child. In a woman’s case, our courts must celebrate that same “evil act” as an exercise of personal autonomy and freedom. Why the duplicity and double-mindedness? It reveals the iniquitous, contradictory political reasoning necessitated by our land’s radical pro-abortion legislation.