Daily Archives: September 13, 2014

The sinful life of Utah homophones

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kneel/ Neil, bury/berry, whore/hoar, flour/flower, cellar/seller, earnest/Ernest

Homophones: words that sound the same but are spelt differently and mean two different things. They often crop up in jokes. Not to mention the title of Oscar Wilde’s play which poked fun at the seriousness of his time: The Importance of Being Ernest.

Here’s the sad but true tale of an unfortunate language teacher in Utah who got sacked for writing on the school website about homophones. The school did not want to be associated with gay sex!
http://www.theweek.co.uk/us/59766/utah-teacher-fired-after-homophone-blog
I just wonder how their biology teacher refers to the species to which we belong.
It could have been worse. Thank heavens he didn’t mention the devil’s own word category: sin-onyms. They’d have burnt him at the stake!

The fan-bloody-tastic world of grammar

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All of you  know all about prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes are added to the front of a word to change its meaning (ex-, pre-, anti-). Suffixes are added to the end of a word to create a new word (-ism, -acy, -ship). English speakers love to be creative with language and constantly invent new words.

But even the most ghastly grammar ghouls among you probably don’t know about infixes?. Far rarer, this is when a part of speech is inserted into an existing word.

The most common example of this is when an expletive is added in this way. e.g. abso-bloody-lutely. This is known as Timesis. Extra-bloody-ordinary what you can learn, eh?
This article explains it all.
http://www.altalang.com/beyond-words/2008/11/03/tmesis-how-ned-flanders-…

Thousands of people do this all the time but very, very few of them know the grammatical term. Now you do!

Want to have some fun with prefixes and suffixes? Try this BBC site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/topic/prefixes-and-suffixes