Complaint #008: The English Language and Other Related Topics, Part I: Homophones and Homographs

I love the English language (without it, I wouldn't be able to write these magnificent blog posts), in general, but there are a few things that should be fixed. And, of course, the first things that need to go are homographs and homophones. Let's take a little time to understand why.

I'll start off with the good: there is a good reason for homographs and homophones to exist: Puns. "Q: A man walks into a bar. What does he say? A: 'Ouch!'" This is a classic joke, but I'll give it up if we can get rid of these homo-words (I use this in a way to group homophones and homographs, and not as some sort of political statement). Along with that, we also need to give up some clever rap lyrics, such as "Like a sprained ankle, boy, I ain't nothing to play with", and despite my guilty pleasure of enjoying some of the worst rap on the planet (it's just so bad, it's hilarious, and I like that), we have to sacrifice, for the sake of humanity (I mean, Drake ended that line with a preposition. C'mon man. (After saying that, I'll probably do the same about 48 times by the end of this post))

Now, let us explore some reasons we need to get rid of the homo-words. Actually, it's really only two examples and they boil down to the same problem: confusion. And actually it's the same reason just applied to the two groups of words. I am simply filling up space by writing worthless sentences to build up suspense. Alrighty, back on topic: homophones. Homophones are words that sound the same, but they have different meanings. Let me set up the situation: I'm sitting, listening to someone give a talk and the speaker starts a sentence with "For physicians...", and there was a slight pause, leaving me a bit confused. Did she say "For physicians" or "Four physicians"? So my brain panics for the milliseconds it takes the speaker to finish "this will lead to a marked improvement in documentation" (OK, I made up that last part, it was probably something along those lines). Had this not been such a simple word to figure out the two different meanings, I would have had to expend brain energy going back and switching what I thought the speaker said at first. Take, for example, "sent". Is the speaker saying "sent", "cent", or "scent"? "Two", "to", or "too"? "By", "bye", or "buy"? Sometimes, one has to wait for the context to come before the specific word can be determined, and this isn't efficient.

This also leads to the following (omnipresent) problem: because people write by how they speak, people often incorrectly spell homophones. It's the reason stupid people write "Your stupid!" in an attempt to insult someone, but really they're insulting themselves (or the American educational system). By far the most frustrating to read is "should of" or "could of" or the like. People, it's supposed to be "should have" and "could have".

The same applies to homographs (words that have the same spelling, but different meaning (for reference, homonyms are both homophones and homographs)). When I read the title "Gone with the Wind", I don't want to sound like an idiot if I accidentally read it as "Gone with the /waɪnd/".

And I don't want to be the guy who complains and doesn't offer a solution, so here it is (however completely impractical and absurd): assign a unique identifying ID to every meaning for every word we need to define. If necessary (although, as a computer scientist I don't understand why), we can assign them string IDs. What do you think?