MORE FUN WITH HOMONYMS

Homonyms is the overall term that covers words that sound and/or look the same but which have different meanings. There are so many of these in English that I cannot possibly tackle them all at once. In an earlier blog I wrote about bear/bear/bare and resent/resent/recent. Today’s blog will review close/close and clothes.

Very versatile is “close”. Close (pronounced with soft S and its hiss or hard S like a Z) can be a verb, adjective or noun. Close (S sound) as an adjective means near. Close, the verb (Z sound) means to shut, to end (as bring to a speech to a close).

As a noun, it can be the end of a speech. The English call a group of houses for which there is no through access a “close”, as in closed off. This use of the word uses the Z sound. “I live in a close,” as a statement is very confusing to American speakers. According to George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde), “The English and Americans are two peoples divided by a common language.” This idea my be featured in a later blog.

So far, so good. It seems simple, but wait. What about “clothes”? The word sounds exactly like “close” the verb or British noun, yet it comes from the word “cloth” Someone could argue, if they were ridiculous enough to do so, that people en-close (surround) themselves in clothing, so there is some connection. Not true but a non-native speaker might be tempted to think so.

“Close” came into English from Latin and “clothes” is a plural form of cloth which is German or Dutch. Do note that the O in cloth is not the long O of clothes. It’s the influence of that silent E which is there for no other purpose. The history of the silent E is touched on in a later blog

There you have it: close (verb), close (noun), close (adjective) and clothes (noun), just three more stumbling blocks along the way to learning English. This brings this blog to a close (noun), but definitely not to the clothes.

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