My friend Rita Bay is posting a series
about "horrible homonyms" and I don’t want to steal her thunder, but here is a
homonym that shouldn’t be one.
Last summer my local newspaper ran a front-page photo of
a farmer’s ruined crop in the field. “Corn Stocks Destroyed by Car,” said the
headline. Well, okay. It’s a stretch,
but one could say the farmer’s future supply of corn was destroyed by some
idiot driving an SUV through the young plants. I shrugged and let it go.
A few weeks later, in a story about farmer’s markets, the
same newspaper featured a photo of fresh, delectable corn piled high. “Stalking
the corn,” said the caption. My mind immediately went into Euell Gibbons mode—I
still use a well-worn copy of his famous book on foraging, Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Then my bent for sci fi took over, and
I imagined mutant corn rampaging over the Great Plains as intrepid
environmentalists hunt it down, armed with hypos of recombinant DNA. I’m
weird like that.
Stalk, stock. To my mind, there’s no confusion about
them. Stalk has an “aw” sound in the
middle, while stock has an “ah”
sound. Could there be a regional variation in the pronunciation? Granted, I’ve
lived in New England for “only” fifteen years, but I have a pretty good ear for
dialect and have always been able to distinguish a difference in the two words.
Perhaps not as distinct as in the Mid-Atlantic, where I grew up, but clearly discernible.
Then I started coming across a similar confusion, from
writers across the country. “He chocked it up to bad parenting.” “Her tummy was
chalk-full.” This isn’t a question of dialect. It’s plain and simple sloppy
speech. Worse, it's sloppy writing.
A chock is a wedge or other item used to prevent movement
or to fill an empty space. A doorstop is a chock. I chock my car to keep it
from rolling backward whenever I put it up on a ramp. If my tummy is chock-full,
I can’t eat another bite. But if your tummy is chalk-full, you’ve been
swallowing pulverized limestone, and that can’t be healthy. “To chalk up” is to
record or attribute, as in writing a point on a scoreboard. (Think of writing
with chalk.) It carries a connotation of a provisional judgment—He blamed her
bad manners on poor parenting, but maybe he was wrong.
We are writers, folks. It’s our job to be precise about
the words we use. Make sure you’ve got the right one.
