I Feel Your “Pane”

(Homonyms: the English language stumbling block)

 

In our wonderful English language, there are so many words that sound the same but are spelled differently and even have different meanings!

Question of the day: What did we ever do as English speakers to deserve such confusion??

Example 1: effect vs affect

WHAT?

This one really wears me out because I’m constantly forgetting which is the verb and which is the noun. It’s not rocket science but it’s not basic math either. It’s somewhere in the middle close to pre-algebra! After reviewing the words, I feel like I need a nap. Remember, affect is a verb, and effect is a noun.

Example 2: the there/they’re/their debacle 

I am by no means an English language guru and I don’t remember a lot of the formal names for types of words because…. *shrug*  Continuing on, “there” is what you use for location such as “There it is, over there” or used in reference to a location such as when you are talking about a law or something like this: “There is a law that states…”

Let’s all go back to elementary school when we learned… CONTRACTIONS. What does that mean you ask? Well, your girl here looked it up 🙂 “The process of becoming smaller.” That’s exactly what we do, and look, I used a contraction in this sentence! “They’re” means they are.  “They are cool.” “They are blue.” “They’re cool.” “They’re blue.”

Onto, their… Their is a possessive word (what? I pronoun? I don’t even knowwwww) and it means it belongs to them. So here it would be like “Their car is rolling” or “their family is large.” That’s pretty much all for that, pretty simple to me.

If you jumbled up these words, you’d be saying stuff that doesn’t even make sense by the English language. If you use they’re in place of there in the sentence “They’re it is,” without the contraction it reads “They are it is.” #MindBlown

Example 3: What pane? This Pain? Or that Payne?

I can’t even pain anymore. For the longest time… I knew that talking about a pane of glass should be spelled different  than pain when I was younger but I was like “But is it really…?” COME TO FIND OUT – IT’S PANE. Holy guacamole. Remember that pain is reserved for a “physical suffering or discomfort caused by injury or illness.”

Payne is a name I threw in there because I can 🙂

Example 4: Threw it through the net.

Threw is a past tense verb (of throw) while through is more of a location specification… hard for me to explain – you know what I mean 🙂 So many people out there let their minds drift to places where through is threw and threw is through. It just isn’t so.

Example 5: No, I didn’t know.

This happens quite a bit… more often than some may think. No is an answer, a lack of something. Know is knowledge, awareness of something. Nahhhhhh 😛

 

Something that is consistent with all of these homonyms is that switching them makes no sense at all. Listening to someone, you’re not going to know how they spell what they’re saying (duh) so that goes unnoticed. Reading a sentence is probably fine unless you’re like me and you get stuck on the spelling and internally criticize the author of the post or book for making such a small mistake. It’s the little things in life, right???

Homonyms… are they really a gift from God? Maybe He’s just being funny… I’m not laughing though 🙂

 

P.S. “finna” is not cool and I don’t understand how that came about nor how that even makes it into our English language… I hear/read it more now and I can’t read it correctly. I’m too traditional. ENGLISH PLEASE. Thanks 🙂