Recent Best of Podcast, are there any words with two h’s in a row? Ray speculated there are probably quite a few. I was guessing some version of ach, but no, that’s not one. The four most common appear to be “ahh”, and 3 versions of “withheld/hold” . There are 82 total according to this word-finding website.
Ray thought bookkeeper is the only common word with 3 double letters in a row. That appears to be correct, with the possible exception of “feeddoor”, the door you’d open to feed coal into your furnace.
Here’s a word to stretch your brain… You know some words spelled exactly the same mean different things… For instance, the word “bow” as in I have a bow and arrow set… And “when the King enters, you should bow from the waist…”
So, what word changes it meaning completely simply by adding a capital letter in the beginning?
If no one knows it, I’ll publish it in a couple of days… So, if you need help, I will hire some “Help”
Not the same but you get the point, no capital, it’s a verb, with a capital, it’s a noun…
That is a good one, I will see if it will “fit” into my repertoire, hey it does, but it is not the one I Was thinking of…
Another hint, it has six letters… and it has nothing to do with automobiles, but if you break down, you may have to use some shoe leather to get to where you were going…
There is a slightly different way of saying it when “cherry” is an adjective (as in cherry-colored or made of cherry wood), as opposed to an “attributive noun”. At least in mainstream U.S. pronunciation; I’m not sure of other dialects. Can you figure out the difference?
No fair looking it up! I suspect it might be easier for people who learned English as a foreign language, because we never covered this in my U.S. public school.
As promised but a bit late, the answer to “what word changes its meaning completely simply by adding a capital letter in the beginning?”
The first hint was…
The uncapitalized word can be a Noun or a Verb… As in, "Will you “polish” (Verb…) the vehicle with car “polish” (Noun…).
The second two hints were…
It has six letters… and it has nothing to do with automobiles, but if you break down, you may have to use some shoe leather to get to where you were going…
The word is:… Drum roll please….
“Polish” or “polish” as in the “The Polish gentleman put polish on his shoes…” or conversely, “The Polish lady put polish on her fingernails…”
However I have to admit that @George_San_Jose1 came up with a good one when he wrote (I’m paraphrasing…) that He can “fit” into a Honda “Fit”…
I was taught in school that English is not a tonal language - that except for the rising pitch at the end of questions, pitch does not affect English language meaning. But that’s not always true - which is what makes this a trick question.
This has to do with “speech melody”.
In the most common dialects of English used in the U.S.A. (I’m not sure about elsewhere) accented syllables have a raised pitch. The first syllable of Cherry is accented, and the second is not.
But we have exceptions to these rules. For example, in the dialects I learned, when an adjective immediately proceeds a noun that it modifies (“I have a cherry cart” but not “My cart is cherry colored”), the last syllable of the adjective has a raised pitch.
I knoW thAt, But I oFten Capitalized a WorD fOr eMpahAsis… L L . . .
I actually type up all my postings in MS Word to double-check my spelling and grammar. Sometimes I have to work to keep the Capital on a word that is not normally Capitalized…
So, please do not take it as a personal affront. I grew up with a Russian Father and a Scottish Mother and I had just as much daily contact with both set of Grandparents
In the Russian language there is no word for “the” and my father had to work to include that in his speech and my Scottish Grandparents received Aeromail several times a week that arrived an an “aeroplane” L L . . .
This was completely silly. Look up capitonyms. They’re not rare. Fit and fit totally count. As do March and march. China and china. Turkey and turkey. May and may. Catholic and catholic. And so on … and on … and on…and on…
You’re not onto anything. You just seem to know about one capitonym.
L . . .
L . . .