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writercisesOriginal Posting 13 May 2009
The other day I woke up playing with an ambiguous phrase. It's actually hard to write, because the two words are both homophones -- they have different spellings which are pronounced almost identically? What I woke up thinking about was just plain missed, or maybe just plane mist?
I think plain/plane has several meanings no matter which of the spellings you look at. There's the plain that means ordinary, and the plain that means prairies and such flat land. And then the plane might be an airplane, it might be a mathematical plane, or it might be the woodworker's plane flattening everything.
I haven't actually sat down with the dictionary to look up the multiple meanings. Yet. But I thought while I was playing with it, I would suggest to you that combining a couple of ambiguities makes more. Is there a plain and fancy missed? What about plain and fancy mist? And then we might have plain, Rocky Mountain, and hilly mists? Or perhaps...
Go ahead. Pick out some ambiguities or words with multiple meanings, and try some of the combinations that most people discard. Who knows what meaning you may find playing in the cracks between words?
Write? It was a plain mist morning that October in Dallas.
The other day I woke up playing with an ambiguous phrase. It's actually hard to write, because the two words are both homophones -- they have different spellings which are pronounced almost identically? What I woke up thinking about was just plain missed, or maybe just plane mist?
I think plain/plane has several meanings no matter which of the spellings you look at. There's the plain that means ordinary, and the plain that means prairies and such flat land. And then the plane might be an airplane, it might be a mathematical plane, or it might be the woodworker's plane flattening everything.
I haven't actually sat down with the dictionary to look up the multiple meanings. Yet. But I thought while I was playing with it, I would suggest to you that combining a couple of ambiguities makes more. Is there a plain and fancy missed? What about plain and fancy mist? And then we might have plain, Rocky Mountain, and hilly mists? Or perhaps...
Go ahead. Pick out some ambiguities or words with multiple meanings, and try some of the combinations that most people discard. Who knows what meaning you may find playing in the cracks between words?
Write? It was a plain mist morning that October in Dallas.
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