We’re surrounded by it. Politicians generate outrage to get attention and motivate people to vote. It’s a political strategy. If cable news can get people outraged enough, then their channel will get a larger audience share. It’s a business strategy.
Me, I’m outraged by the intentional stoking of outrage; the concomitant disrespect of the truth.
While making sure I was using a word properly, I came across an article by Columbia Journalism Review on homophones; words that sound alike but are spelled differently or mean different things.
https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/callus-callous.php
They were writing a mea culpa:
A FEW WEEKS AGO, when we wrote about the confusion over the homophones “poor,” “pour,” and “pore,” we said that another anatomical use of “pore” was “a type of callous that forms at the site of a healing fracture.”
More than one hardened reader called us out. We were careless to use “callous” and not “callus.” We made a homophone error in an article about homophone errors. How embarrassing, and ironic.
It’s an easy mistake to make, though we should have caught it before readers did. After all, the adjective “callous” means “being hardened and thickened,” as Merriam-Webster says. But “callus” is a noun, meaning “a thickening of or a hard thickened area on skin or bark.”
How great is that? They made a homophone error in an article about homophone errors!
I got a call this afternoon that there was an unusual hummingbird half an hour from our house. (Thank you Jon.) A drive there and:
Mexican Violetear.
That’s not a normal bird for us. It lives in Mexico and Central America.
Texas bird number 403 for the year. A nice surprise!
On the Laguna Meadow trail in Big Bend, on the way back down to the basin, something occurred to me. I got a hiking merit badge for doing a 10-mile hike in the mountains when I was in the Boy Scouts. I should get a badge for doing it again 60 years later! (Yes, a mind can wander anywhere while hiking for hours, right?)
Next challenge: Imagine up a governing body to award me this honor. Man Scouts??? Maybe I need to take another hike and find where my mind wanders to next…
