Homonyms an ominous omen

Two bee ore naught too be? That ease something eye halve bin one during four sum thyme. Read these lines out loud to someone near enough to hear. Did he understand? And were you confused? Did your eyes say “Dear God, no!” while your ears screamed “Yes, yes, yes!” If sew, your knot a loan.

Homophones (words that sound alike but are spelled differently) and homonyms (that are spelled as well as pronounced the same) have been the bane of my existence for the past month or so. Let me relate an anecdote, wherein a friend of mine mistakenly forgets her “cell” at my place. Being the gentlemen that I am, I quickly begin a thorough and tireless search of my apartment, peering into every nook and cranny. However, my understanding of what has been misplaced is disguised behind the shared pronunciation between a cell — as in shortened nickname for cellular telephone — and the living cell — the basic functional unit of living organisms. I'd settle for an honest mistake, but not when it means I spend nearly two hours crawling around my home with a microscope, scouring every conceivable surface for dead skin and bodily fluids. She had meant for me to retrieve her communication device, but it’s clear to me that even with a cell phone, our system of communication is seriously impaired.

The most heinous offence perpetrated by the dreaded homophones is that they’re simply unnecessary, as inconsequential to the fate of mankind as the skin on a peanut, or Rush Hour 3. Why, in a language with essentially endless combinations of 26 letters, must we be reduced to doubling and sometimes tripling ambiguities between words because of haphazardly assigned meanings forcing their ways onto a single phonetic unit?

It doesn’t seem to be in the English language’s best interest to have the terms buy, by, bi and bye charged with several degrees of distinct meaning, while words like, say, bik and buk, are wasted, regulated to being nothing more than nonsensical gibberish. There’s plenty of potential in three-letter words that is left unemployed in this word economy, and we must do our parts to increase employment in times of a recession. Although I’m pretty sure the wage for being a word isn’t that great, but it’s at least something.

And while I’m at it, why do we have these unnecessarily long words like giraffe or xylophone, which are used in favour of shorter and sharper words like gir or even gi. It’s a complete travesty when phonetic sounds like hour and our tirelessly pull double duty while lazy slackers like vub collect dust on the shelf of common usage.

Furthermore, despite the fact that my troubles with homophones should be relatively apparent to everyone, companies like Nintendo and Amazon seem to only further complicate the language, adding their Wiis and Kindles to an already cluttered lexicon. New technology ought to be accompanied by cool futuristic names — like Xawc. "Give the birds back their twitter" is what I’m getting at.

Of course, the English language isn’t going to change overnight: it took a few centuries to screw it up as bad as it is now, so we can’t expect the problem to disappear on its own. What we need now is an Orwellian seizure of the dictionary, reducing and reassigning words to take shorter and less ambiguous forms. In time, we’ll return to the days where a horse was just a horse, of course, of course, and didn’t imply that your throat was sore or dry.

I hope you will join me in this word revolution. But perhaps you’re crying out in horror at my new vision of the future. You realize that the loss of homophones and homonyms also comes with loss of our “precious” puns. How will comedians write jokes now? How will editors title articles without them? Sacrifices will half too bee maid, butt they certainly won’t bee inn vein.