"Mel quickly returned from stuffing the garbage (bag) down the shoot."
Most of my readers probably know that, what an apartment-building dweller stuffs their garbage bag down is not a 'shoot', but a 'chute'. Chute is also the word you use for one of those slides kids go down, at a kids' playground. And there are "Chutes and Ladders," the game, and so on.
The sentence was taken from an excellent book that I'm 📚 reading. There is even an adorable seven-year-old who's on the spectrum, and a trans person, and someone who's non-binary. The 'them' pronoun is a pain, though I see why some people prefer it <sigh>.
Yet another pair of homonyms: wear, and ware. This pair is tricky, because each word can mean quite different things.
The first meaning of Wear is putting on clothes; clothes you've already got on, or just thinking about what they're for.
The second meaning of it is being worn down, worn out, or thinking of something being used up. There's a lot of wear on your brake pads!
I can think of really only one meaning of ware: it is usually hyphenated with some other descriptive word, kitchen ware, hardware, cookware, etc. You could use the word 'ware' by itself, but it would be a learned use; perhaps in the plural, e.g. the wares of his trade.
Also break, and brake! Break means to damage, or to separate (mid-semester break). By the way, a 'semester' means six months! I can't imagine semesters being six months long, so they should be called trimesters, but kids—and parents—would think they aren't getting their money's worth. Brake means a mechanism for slowing a vehicle down and stopping it.
Kay
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