For obvious reasons, given the proliferation of misinformation and “alternate facts” swirling around the internet and on Fox News, I have been thinking about stupidity as of late. Here is a tongue-in-cheek essay that I felt compelled to write.

Okay. Here is another set of homophones for you to match up. (See the previous “Match the Homophone Pairs” for an explanation of this word game.) If you get stuck, I’ve attached the answers below.

This is not good poetry, but I like the idea:

Here’s another game.  

Heteronyms are words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings, like “bow” (pronounced “BAU” and meaning to lower one’s head, or the front of a ship) and “bow” (pronounced “BOH” and meaning the weapon used to shoot arrow).

So, in this game you are given a clue for a pair of heteronyms, like “displays the gifts,” and you try to guess the heteronym answer (“presents presents”).  Got it?

(As a help, I’ve put these in alphabetical order.  Another hint:  years ago my father noted that many English heteronyms are words formed with a Latin-based prefix, and that when used as a verb the accent is on the last syllable and when used as a noun or adjective the accent is on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable—e.g. “presénts présents”.)

— Puts together threshing machines

— To shrink the legal agreement

— Finds the felons guilty

—Leave the arid region

—People who sketch bureaus

—The bird of peace went into the water

—Confines the physicians in training

—Someone out sick with a bogus excuse

—A short 60 seconds

—Improve the ideal

—A shoeshine in Krakow

—Get a song down on vinyl

—Will not take garbage

—A toilet outlet for a Singer operator

—A crying jag

—Coil up blowing air

—Coiled up an injury

If you are stuck, here are the answers:

My wife put together a YouTube video (8 mins) of the trip we took last month in celebration of my 70^th birthday.  Highlights of what we saw include the Roman villas of La Tejada and Olmeda (3^rd-4^th cen. AD), the Gothic cathedral at Burgos (mostly 15^th-16^th cens.), a casona in Burgos where the Reyes Catolicos Isabel and Fernando received Christopher Columbus (on my birthday in 1497!),  an amazing “bubble hotel” where we stayed near Tirig, the Mesolithic/Neolithic rock shelter paintings at Valltorta (ca. 10,000-8,000 BCE; the video has reconstructions of the Levantine Art paintings from the Valltora museum because the paintings in the rock shelters are quite faded and impossible to photograph), the elaborate tomb of Queen Isabel’s parents at Cartuja de Miraflores (carved by the Flemish sculptor Gil de Siloé between 1489 and 1493), the Paleolithic site of Atapuerca where remains of early hominids and Neanderthals have been found (dating from 1.3 million to 500,000 years ago; on display in Burgos’ amazing Museum of Human Evolution), and the reconstructed Iberian town at Calafell (5^th-2^nd cens. BCE) on the Mediterranean.

Okay, here is a little word game.  I didn’t invent it; my wife saw it in a New York Times magazine when we were visiting the States last October.  (They called it “Sound Check “ but I prefer my title.)  The way it works is that you have to match a clue for a common multi-word or multi-syllable phrase in the left-hand column with a clue in the right-hand column to a homophone of that same phrase.  For instance, you might see a clue “Equine sound” in the left-hand column and guess that it might be a clue for “Horse neigh” and then look in the right-hand column to see the clue “Harsh denial” (=“Hoarse nay”).  Got it?

(Note:  two homophone in each column are the same, so there are two different ways to link them up.  If you get stuck, message me and I will send you the answers.

Here is a slightly off-colored poem:

Here is the third in the trilogy of memoirs after “Shiny Bits” and “Looking from Both Sides.”

Here is a follow-up autobiographical essay to “Shiny Bits,” examining the origins of my anthropological worldview.

This new essay was inspired by some mobiles I recently made, from sea glass I have been collecting at the Ribadesella beach and from “shiny bits” of beads and broken jewelry I’ve been picking up while walking around Oviedo.