Watch Out for Ambiguity
rogersgeorge on March 15th, 2016
One principle of expository writing is that it be clear. This means, partly, that you can immediately tell what each word means. Many many words have more than one meaning, so you have to be careful if you want to be clear.
If you want to be funny, though (an antithesis, perhaps, of writing clearly) these multiple-meaning words provide a font of material. Here’s a comic, Fox Trot, that makes passing reference to correct use of case (I/me) but uses two words ambiguously to create humor. Can you tell what the two words are?
It occurred to me that a third word, “English,” could also have two meanings—the country or the language. (Snicker.)
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