Monday, June 20, 2005

You keep using those words... I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Thanks to friend and regular comment contributor Keith for this bit of deft wordplay. Ah, the joy of English, where verbs are homonyms of nouns and adjectives, and helping verbs can be main verbs, and adjectives can concatenate themselves onto nouns as prefices or suffices, and they all have a gay old time.

The mad frog was hopping around the man.
The madman was hopping around the frog.
The man was mad frogging around the hop.
Around the frog, the man was hopping mad.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The man was mad: the frog was hopping around.

Anonymous said...

correction:
The man was mad; the frog, hopping around.

This changes the meaning of my first post, from the man being annoyed because the frog escaped his death-trap to a man being perturbed that was hit in the face by a live frog.

At least, those are the stories I came up with to explain my sentences.

The frogman was hopping around the Mad. (He didn't like the magazine's witty send-up of a popular recent movie. Or perhaps he's compulsive after a depth charge went off too close to his head. Poor, poor frogman. At least the military's paying for his magazine subsciption.)

Anonymous said...

"Suffices"? Congratulations, fellas: a new low.

Anonymous said...

So you didn't post in vain:
Suffices pl. n. suff i sees
pl. of suffix.
Hope that suffices. (suff ices) :-)

Now that's a fun vein to tap.

Any other words that are completely different yet spelled the same?

Watch the man desert in the desert. (He wants a dessert.)
This works (and if you spell it with two s's it sounds the same again.)

The depressed man depressed The Button. (His shirt had come back from the cleaners depressed?)
Depressed might not be a word, but is depressed?

Well, we'll clean the wheel well while you clean the wily ewe, well.

Question: How does one "while" away the hours? When did while become a verb? While nobody was looking? How wily. Wily means full of wile. Willfull does not.

Well, I will will my full well to wily Will, while I will will my well eye to willful Wile E. (The glass eye goes to the roadrunner.)

Why am I not writing my own blog?
I dunno. It's easier just to post in this one.

Anonymous said...

Keith: in WWII, they spent some time trying to polish off the Polish...

(That's gotta be the only word pronounced differently if it's capitalized.)