The six most often confused:
Some others that get honorable mentions:
This definitely isn't a complete list but you can feel free to /msg me with more you'd like to add.
This was excerpted and expanded from my version of The Scribner Handbook for Writers, ©1995 by DiYanni and Hoy.
Then I think back, remembering as a child deriving puerile delight from the circumvention of hardware censorship of obscenity on Texas Instruments Speak-and-Spell devices, emulated through software in early text-to-speech toys such as Dr. SBAITSO, who would turn four-letter words into parity errors. My grade 4 francais teacher was reluctant to discuss seals with her class but these poor machines hadn't been equipped to expect anything so deviously intent on perversity, and through kreativ mizpelling nd kal-queue-latid zownd aniloggs we soon had them pealing out a blue streak that would turn our parents' faces white at the vision of the future we were affording them.
So now I contemplate decades later and wiser a re-application of this phonetic technique for different, but equally scurrilous ends. I ponder the opening lines of Jabberwocky (not because it, well in the public domain, needs to be obfuscated for any copyright purposes, but because its (contextlessly) nonsensical meaning is not significantly altered by the change) where
"Obey be bay bee, haw us ass up post two note / hat sum thin was in trite ear?" not only conveys (more-or-less) the sound of the opening lines of Britney Spears' breakout pop hit Baby One More Time, but to be fair also goes a long way towards effectively communicating the nuanced story and unresolved philosophical issues contained in the text of the song's lyrics, common to number one pop chart-toppers -- diplomatically put, it says as little as the original lyrics did without maintaining the illusion that further contemplation might reveal deeper meanings from the pointed gibberish.
(One might suggest that the sung syllables there are used less to convey word-meaning information and more to convey voice-as-a-musical-instrument information of tone and timbre... would that then protect lyricists from these adaptations under the same laws that govern new arrangements of existing musical compositions? This is after all only an alternate system of notation designed to produce a near-to-identical output. Is the output not what the letter of the law applies to? My MP3s, of course, are only long collections of ones and zeroes that TOTALLY COINCIDENTALLY happen to sound like forgotten items from the cancelled back catalogue of record companies when fed through WinAmp. What are the chances? And am I not allowed to possess the zeros and ones in that particular configuration, or do they become forbidden only once they meet the mp3-playing software? But this is a different ball of wax.)
Just as the Pinyin (also apparently a phonetic alphabet) and other alternate-alphabet sets here that don't render as anything comprehensible without Unicode enabled (but are tolerated nonetheless), so too these entries could appear garbled gibberish until activated by the appropriate output device: being read out loud. The device could be activated by header information: The following write-up is designed to be read out loud. You may find it makes little sense visually scanned. But despite this entirely reasonable proposal for maintaining access to the great texts of our times here in an audible form, I expect I will be advised to go pitch my plan to the people at homophonicpiracy2.com
(Be glad I indulged this half-woken notion rather than the prior... still doing research on that one 8) (munch, smack).If you really want to make me eat my words (and, well, we shall see what happens when my foot is in my mouth), convert this w/u into a phonetic script and trick me into remarking that it's incomprehensible 8)
Hom"o*phone (?), n. [Cf. F. homophone. See Homophonous.]
1.
A letter or character which expresses a like sound with another.
Gliddon.
2.
A word having the same sound as another, but differing from it in meaning and usually in spelling; as, all and awl; bare and bear; rite, write, right, and wright.
© Webster 1913.
printable version chaos
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