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Feb
5
The Same . . . But Different
Filed Under Blisses Me Off
PREAMBLE: In her book, One Continuous Mistake, Gail Sher says: “Revisiting the same subject day after day will force you to exhaust stale, inauthentic, spurious thought patterns and dare you to enter places of subtler, more “fringe” knowing.” Working with that thought and a craving for dropping down deeply into areas that interest me, February (the month of love and calendar home to my birthday) (my birthday being on the very day that gives February its theme of love, no less) revolves around a theme of things I love, a.k.a. things that just bliss me off.
***
Today I’m positively blissed off about homophones. I’ve collected them ever since I got my hands on that Co’Cola tablet in fifth grade. See, one day a year - usually in the spring - the Co’Cola man would come by the elementary school and drop off a tablet and pencil for every kid in the school. It was the highlight of my year, I tell you, and I still have several of the tablets, all tied together with string now cause the glue in those little notebooks never was what I’d call good.
That year, while others did slam books and drew sketches in their tablets, I filled mine with homophones. And sentences using homophones to illustrate, of course. I like homophones for the same reason I like school uniforms. And rock collections. And Southern accents.
They are the same . . . but different.
Homophones sound alike, but are constructed differently, and each word means something entirely different.
There’s:
sweet/suite
all/awl
know/no
I’ll/isle
ad/add
ante/auntie
arc/ark
call/caul
carat/carrot
knight/night
and the ever-popular red/read
I could go on forever and ever, but bandwidth being what it is and all, I won’t.
School uniforms make students look the same, so it is incumbent upon each student to find ways to flash their identity (within the rules of conduct, of course), and it is incumbent upon the teachers to look past the outer clothing and see each individual student.
Same goes for rock collections: they are all rocks, but each rock is of a different shape, picked up on a different spot of earth, made up of different materials and at the hand different forces. Here are a few of my current favorites I’ve got sitting around:
Picasso marble from Utah. Isn’t it fabulous the way it looks like a forest or winterscape when cut?
Moonstone (perched on a 3-legged stand handcarved from a piece of walnut by a fella in NC):
Selenite, formed when seawater becomes isolated and evaporates:
And good ole’ NC granite, embellished with a feather. Polarity, it says to me. Grounded flight. Earth and air. Oh, don’t get me started.
And Southern accents, good gracious don’t I love them. There’s one term “Southern accent”, but let me tell you: there are more varieties than you can say grace over. It’s downright amazing how many different ways the same word can be said in Southern tongues. Perhaps the differences are most obvious when pronouncing names of Southern cities. Charleston, South Carolina, for example, is “CHAHLston”. Albany, a town in south Georgia, is called “allBEENee” by the natives who ought to know. A little bit up the road is Fayette County, home to Fayetteville (pronounced “FETvulL”; Tyrone (TIErone); and Woolsey (WULzey). At least by those in the know.
You wanna’ know why I like these things so much?
I’m gonna’ answer that with a story: My Grandmother served a big meal in the middle of the day. After everybody had finished eating, Grandmother took the leftovers and transferred them to smaller bowls and saucers. Then she fetched a clean tablecloth and spread it over the leftovers she’d gathered in the middle of the table.
Should you happen by later because you were hungry, you’d come up the backsteps, step inside the backdoor, and know in a flash whether there were leftovers or not ’cause the table was just a few feet to the right of the backdoor. But while you knew there was food there, you had absolutely no idea what you were about to eat till you raised the tablecloth and looked underneath into every single bowl and saucer.
Thank you for CHEWSING to stop by today. Hope you’ll do it again, real soon.
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life, nature, rocks, family, Southern, collections, leftovers, accents
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that is a great story….
Hi Jeanne,
I also love rocks, inside or out, and even in my purse (always carry a few). There’s something just so solid about them. I particularly liked your feather-rock above! I also, even living in Kansas and being from New Jersey/York, love southern accents, but especially Texas ones, and the Charleston one is quite charming too as well as the one you have in your speaking and writing! I agree that there are many varieties of them, and to generalize is like confusing Mica and Limestone!
Thanks, Jeanne!
Caryn