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Get Good at Grammar: Homographs, and Why They Piss Me Off
I’m not a word doctor, but I am really good at words and want to help you help your words. Just think of me as an unlicensed linguisticologist.
In this installment, I learn ya how to hunt down homographs like the disgusting creatures they are, spatchcock them, and feed them to your own writing as a tasty snack.
What the crap are homographs?
Technically, homographs are words that are spelled the same way, and may or may not be pronounced the same way, although the difference in pronunciation is often just a shift in the accented syllable.
However, this is a boring definition, and I have talked to Webster about replacing theirs with the really cool definition I shat out below:
Homographs are words that swiped their letters from other words but wanted to confuse people so they made up their own meanings and demanded that people pronounce their names differently from the victims they stole their letters from in the first place. The bastards.
If you want to learn why homographs deserve to be victims of vocabicide, below are some damn examples:
Attribute
When pronounced as a [uh-trib-yoot], “attribute” means “to think of as belonging to or originating in…
