Road, rode, rowed

I was reading Greg Freeman: A Gentleman, A Gentle Man (2003, newspaper columns by Greg Freeman, 191 pages).  On pages 132-134, he wrote about Trevelyn Zander, a man who began a coast-to-coast trip in 1999 — on a lawn tractor.  He pulled a small trailer that said, "Help mow down prostate cancer with research and education."

Trevelyn had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a couple of years earlier, had his prostate removed, and wanted to raise money for research and education.  That's the photo of him I found with his obituary; he died in November 2022 at the age of 95.  He lived over two decades more.

So why am I sharing that particular story?  Because donors who gave $500 would get a T-shirt saying, "I know a guy who road a lawn tractor coast to coast."  Read that quote again, if you missed the homophone.

Word of the Day

homophone /ˈhoʊməfoʊn / noun = a word that sounds the same as another word but has a different meaning and/or spelling.  Examples:  "Flour" and "flower" are homophones because they are pronounced the same, but you can’t bake a cake using daffodils.  Other examples are write and right, meet and meat, peace and piece, bare and bear.

You have to listen to the context to know which word someone means if homophones are spoken aloud.  If they say they like your jeans (genes?), they’re probably talking about your pants and not your height and eye color, but you would have to figure it out from the situation.

Credit:  "Homophone."  Dictionary, Vocabulary.com.  Accessed 13 Feb. 2024.

Back to the fellow on the lawn tractor.  Yes, he "rode" a lawn tractor, but he did it on the "road."  You know how I love playing with words, and I immediately thought of a third word that sounds the same:  "rowed."  I have no idea what kind of lawn tractor the man had, but there's an example of a more recent one at the top.  Should I also show you a boat being "rowed"?  Okay, here's a man rowing a dinghy: