Homo Confusion

It's a boring Saturday afternoon. The weather is non-descript and dreary. I sorely crave the caffeine I deny myself in liquid form. But for you, I battle through the haze and fog on my endless quest to illuminate your dim minds, and in so doing, share the light. Who am I kidding? I feel flat, but I do have a few observations I wanted to share.

I was teaching students how to distinguish between some easily confused homonyms like "affect" and "effect", "accept" and "except, and other separate words with similar sounds. I stumbled across  a few homonyms that I  needed to clarify in my own mind before I taught them. This could be embarrassing, but I don't claim expertise in anything. My blind spots are everywhere. Sometimes basic words elude me and my memory of fractions and long division is sketchy. Back on task: the first confusion "Ensure" vs. "Insure." I do not write about the meal in a can for old people, rather "ensure" means to guarantee a certain outcome, to make sure that something will happen. Of course, I knew this, but I wonder how many times when I used that word "ensure" that I thought I was using the word "insure" which has to do with the payments you make to protect yourself against against financial ruin as a result of car accidents, acts of God, clogged arteries, or robot apocalypse.

 I'm not sure I ever made a conscious distinction between. "Altogether" and " all together" either. "Altogether" means whole or complete, as in "I'm not sure she's altogether sane." "All together" refers to a group coming together. Imagine some nervous looking man taking a picture of your 7/8th grade  baseball team, taking way more pictures than anyone wants to stand around for, all for the perfect photograph that no one present cares about. He yells, for the 6th time, "all together now and smile!"