Some words sound the same, but are spelled differently and carry different meanings. Other words, among my favorites, are near misses, close calls, words that look or sound a bit alike but are rarely used in proximity or rarely confused: poetry and poultry. If I were writing a story about bird watchers riding on German superhighways, I’d be tempted to use autobahn and Audubon in the same passage.

My friend Peter Meinke has written a wonderful sonnet sequence titled “Mendel’s Laws,” in which the narrator marvels at his wife’s pregnancy at Christmas time:


When I first heard Peter read this poem, I could not believe my ears: he had managed to use in a single stanza the words paragon, paradox, paradigm and paradise, all with precise meaning, yet not forced for effect. I wonder if he was tempted to get “pair of dice” in there too.

About 400 years earlier, the great English poet and churchman, George Herbert, wrote a poem called “The Collar.” It is a brilliant self-reflection on the author’s identity as both a poet and priest, and his anger and rebellion against the yoke of his vocation, symbolized by the religious collar he wears. The title also suggests the word “choler,” one of the four Elizabethan humours, describing an angry disposition. I remember shocking my graduate school teacher by suggesting another close call: collar, choler, and caller.

Consider the final lines, which describe the poet’s ultimate acquiescence to the will of God:

                    At every word,
                    And I reply’d, My Lord.

The word vocation derives from the Latin "vocare": to call. God is the Caller who soothes the poet’s Choler and loosens the burden of his Collar.

Beyond the close call lies a small pile of English words that look the same, sound the same, but have opposite meanings. Think of Mr. Homophone and Ms. Antonym hooking up and creating a love child.  Let’s call the little bastard Ant-o-phony.

Lots of words, through irony and slang, can be converted to their opposites. The word “bad,” for example, has been transformed in American popular culture, so that if I refer to a blues singer as “bad,” there’s a good chance that I mean he’s really “good.” In parts of New England, “wicked” works the same way, intensifying the effect of a word in phrases such as “wicked cool” or “wicked hot.” The context almost always makes the meaning clear.

The same can be said with “sand,” which can mean to make smooth or rough. If I sand a desktop, my goal is to make it smooth. But if I sand an icy driveway, I want to make it rough, to give my tires traction. Again, these are rarely confused.

But what about the word "sanction," as in the book and movie title “The Eiger Sanction”?  For reasons I find puzzling, sanction can mean to permit or to prohibit. “I cannot sanction the use of cell phones by students in the cafeteria.” Principal Hudpucker better be more specific. She may not want her students on their cellies in the eatery, but she may have given the kiddies permission to think otherwise.

Which leads me to “cleave,” a word that can mean to join together or to split apart. A meat cleaver divides a steak into two pieces. But Ward Cleaver might have once or twice admired June’s cleavage.  Hmmm. Did he ever cleave to his wife’s cleavage? (And does cleavage describe the line that separates the breasts or the cleft that occurs when a wonder bra pushes them together?)

If I overlook your work, am I supervising it or failing to attend to it? If I have a care, it means that I suffer worry or tribulation, which is why I need someone to take care of me.

So is this language knowledge a curiosity or a potential tool? The evidence for utility comes in the form of an e-mail message that offered me praise for an essay I wrote about the coincidence of the deaths of President Gerald Ford and the King of Soul, James Brown.

It began:




The word “funk,” it turns out, can have an upbeat or downbeat meaning, each with a different word history. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the word “funk” can mean “a state of cowardly flight” or “a state of severe depression.”  These uses probably derive from the Flemish word "fonck," meaning disturbance or agitation. So -- back to my story -- Gerald Ford helped lift America out of the blues left behind by Watergate and the corruption of Richard Nixon.

But for James Brown, the word “funk” would carry this definition: “An earthy quality appreciated in music such as jazz, or soul.” In a wonderful bit of word history, the American Heritage Dictionary traces “funky” to 1784, where it was used to describe “musty moldy old cheese” and could be extended to describe body odor, a joyful earthiness that would one day be extended to the syncopated pleasure of playing or listening to music with soul.    


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