Hi, welcome to my website. I write short stories, novellas and screenplays, sometimes under the pen name T. T. Trestle. I’m also working on a couple of novels (or maybe vice versa). I live in Ottawa, Canada, a stone’s throw from the Parliament Buildings, assuming you have an exceptionally aerodynamic stone and the strength of ten men.
Given what’s happening in the world these days, it seems that we inevitably start discussing the same topic – our favourite punctuation mark. For me, there’s no contest. It’s the interrobang. It’s got the cool name. It combines the boppy élan of the exclamation mark and the Socratic wisdom of the interrogative point. It looks good on paper, especially compared to all the other boring punctuation. The apostrophe?! A catastrophe. The semilcolon!? More like semicolonic. The hyphen?! Mostly hype. They’re nothing compared to…
Quite a few superheroes have descriptive taglines associated with them. For example, Superman is the Man of Steel and the Avengers are Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Batman, Superman’s bestest frenemy, the rich man’s Punisher, has a tag that’s a bit of a head-scratcher: World’s Greatest Detective. After all, the Caped Crusader is not exactly Sherlock Holmes. Picture this conversation between Commissioner Gordon and our hero.
GORDON: Someone has stolen all the fishes from the Gotham Aquarium!
BATMAN: Hmm, who could have perpetrated such a nefarious act? The Riddler? Catwoman? Two-Face? I’ll have to return to the Batcave and do some detecting in front of a bank of really impressive computer screens.
GORDON: Hey, do you think it could have been the Penguin?
But Batman has already vanished into the night.
No one cares about confusonyms. Synonyms and antonyms get all the glory. We study them in school. We learn long lists of them. Everybody knows that the antonym of synonym is antonym. Even their slightly annoying cousin, the homonym, is a bigger star in the linguistic universe. I mean, isn’t it obvious what the difference between ‘bare’ and ‘bear’ is without having a word to describe the concept? (Note: if you don’t understand the difference then you should probably avoid the woods.)
How come the confusonym doesn’t get any love? It is the rarest of the -nyms. Practically mythic. If it were an animal it would definitely be a cryptid. It has a much more subtle definition than a word that means the same thing as another word. That’s boring. Dull. Tedious. Humdrum.
Unlike the confusonym, which rocs [sic]!
Confusonym n. a word that is mistaken for another word due to identical spelling with the exception of one letter.
One measly letter. That’s all it takes to change everything. For example, leech and leach. One is a slimy bloodsucking parasite and one is a boring verb that means to remove stuff from other stuff by filtering a liquid through it. If you don’t think there’s a big difference between the two words then I recommend you watch the leach scene in Stand By Me. I’m sure Wil Wheaton would have much preferred it to be a leech scene.
Oops. I just confused my confusonyms.
