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A lesson on how to lessen confusion

By Ed Goldman

If you’re someone who passed a course in English as a Second Language, or the jauntier ESL, you have my unqualified respect. 

For younger readers, “unqualified respect” doesn’t mean I don’t qualify to respect the ESL students. It means my respect has neither qualifiers nor caveats. And caveats are neither fish roe nor ascot-like ties—those are caviar and cravats. Christ almighty, younger readers, please become actual readers.

I don’t think I could easily learn a language that includes so many homonyms—bear and bare; there, their and they’re;  your, you’re and yore—that one’s mind (mined) tends to reel (real). 

Do you pray for a prey, steal some steel, park your boat at a pier with your peers (and give birth at their berth)? 

When you get together at a steakhouse do you meet for some meat? 

Does “can” mean to fire someone or encase edibles? (Old farmer joke: Question: “What do you do with all those vegetables?” Answer: “Well, we can what we can. And what we can’t, we can.”)

Is it right to write about a private rite? Do you have to be here to hear? Are you allowed to speak aloud? Is it helpful to drink ale when you ail, to toss a flower into your flour, and is this really our hour?

When you’re an heir and you err, do you air it? Do you wear a dress to address your board (who’s bored)? Do you founder at naming your company’s founder?

Have you ever seen your yogi bare? 

How fair was your fare to go to the Renaissance faire? And when you arrived, did you see a deer, Dear?

Did you spend your evening busily evening up the odds when you played stud poker with some stud? And did your tuxedo shirt have as many studs as your ears? And just how hale did you look when hail arrived as you hailed a taxi the next morning or were you already in mourning because you’d just played chess and didn’t make it through the knight?

Here’s one that Groucho Marx mock-professed to mix up: “Oh, why can’t we break away from all this, just you and I, and lodge with my fleas in the hills? I mean flee to my lodge in the hills.”

I’d invite you on a picnic but I don’t know whether the weather will cooperate. And if you bring your relatives, will your aunts be attacked by ants? (Corrective note: Just pronounce “aunts” to rhyme with “haunts.” But then you’re going to have to rhyme “niche” with “sheesh” instead of “witch.”)

And speaking of witches, which is to say, did you write it right?

When I see you off to the mall, where I hope the crowd wont maul you, if I say “Bye-bye” don’t think I’m suggesting you “Buy! Buy!”

How many polling firms blew it in the blue states? It’s too irritating to contemplate, even if they lost only two of them.

“Do you know how to say no in French?” “Yes. Non.” “Okay, which one is it?”