I love plays on words and playing with words; I hope you do, too. The following were accumulated from a variety of sources just for your enjoyment.

I grew up playing with a dictionary and my mother used the same language with me that she used with her friends; if I didn’t understand something I was told to look it up in the dictionary, but why is the word dictionary in the dictionary?

Another thing that always worried me and made me wonder was if a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

Spelling is my bane (spell check is my salvation); I sounded out words, but why isn’t phonetic spelled the way it sounds?

If adding ‘in’ makes opposites, e.g., cautious and incautious, why do flammable and inflammable mean the same thing?

I don’t know about other languages, but English is confusing; for example, if a pronoun is a word used in place of a noun, is a proverb a word used in place of a verb?

Riddle me this, is an oxymoron a really dumb bovine?

Finally, in a nod to my techie friends I ask, are part-time band leaders semi-conductors?

Flickr image credit: TEDxNJLibraries

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2013 at 1:15 am and is filed under Expand Your Mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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