Junior Linguist: Homophonic News with Alliteration
Writing is just a bunch of signifiers. It can be quite funny if you “unfocus” your eyes and “turn up the volume.” No, the term homophone doesn’t have anything to do with gays and telephones. Instead it’s used in my title as an adjective describing a news story using a humorous choice of words that sound the same but are spelled differently combined with alliteration, the first sound repeated through words strung together.
Maybe it’s the junior linguist in me who finds it funny, but I thought others might as well. This is the curse of taking a few linguistic courses in grad school, you’re often left laughing all by yourself. Read this headline from today’s Reuters 3 times fast:
Majority of Poles against U.S. shield plan: poll
(It gets better) Now read this first paragraph from the article that way: emphasis on the homophones:
WARSAW (Reuters) - More than half of Poles oppose the location of part of a U.S. anti-missile shield on Polish soil, a poll showed on Tuesday, a day after the Polish president said the project was a foregone conclusion.
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