Talk:No Homophones/@comment-4665292-20170128091209

I first misread the title and couldn't get over how funny it would've been if in the end it turned out that she'd actually said "no homophobes" rather than "no homophones", and that the narrator had simply misheard it. Then, she could've explained tearfully how there had been some incident in the spell bee previous to the one the narrator participated in, like a gay student being laughed at or whatever, and the reason she said there would be "no homophobes" was to imply that bullying wouldn't be tolerated, and pleading for him to not hurt her since the whole thing was a misunderstanding and there actually had been no homophones. There could've then been a twist ending with the narrator actually being a homophobe to explain why he went so far as to actually cut her with the knife.

...but I guess that would've been even more ridiculous, so yeah. My only nitpick is that some of the words aren't homophones in every accent, including "colonel" and "kernel". English isn't my first language, so the way I pronounce them is obviously different, but in some accents/dialects of English they really are distinct even at the phonemic level, /kɜːnəl/ and /kɜɹnəl/ respectively. I imagine there's probably some accent/dialect where the first vowel in "colonel" is rounded; maybe in Australia or New Zealand? Anyway, it was an interesting read even if it wasn't exactly creepy.