Homophones are a boring subject, aren’t they? You know, twin-sets of words which, despite their different spellings and meanings, sound much the same said out loud: ‘fair’ and ‘fare’, for example, ‘hair’ and ‘hare’, or ‘pair’ and ‘pear’.
So, when I taught the concept to schoolchildren many years ago, I always tried spinning them a little yarn about how, whilst on holiday in Spain, an appalled waiter reported me to the police after I asked him to bring me a large gateaux covered in jam and cream for dessert in a restaurant one evening. What I didn’t realise at the time, I said, was that the Spanish didn’t use the word ‘gateaux’, and that, over there, it was a homophone for the native word ‘gato’, meaning ‘cat’. Eventually, of course, the misunderstanding was resolved before the waiter and I had a good laugh about it all, and he just served me up a much more acceptably Spanish pudding in the shape of a rotten donkey-head smeared all over with blood, horse-dung, dead flies, paella and trifle instead.
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