Homoepistulaverbumphones

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Ben Causey. I’m talking to you from Godly, Texas.

All right, well, welcome, Ben. What can we do for you?

Well, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I’m calling from Godly Elementary School in case we have some students listening later.

I’ve got to give you just a quick background and then my question.

One evening I was, this was last year, as a matter of fact, I was watching Netflix and I was just looking for a good movie to watch.

And I saw the word Q, you know, spelled Q-U-E-U-E. And I always had trouble spelling that.

So I was trying to think of a mnemonic, you know, to remember how to spell it.

And I noticed that Q sounds just like its first letter. And I thought, that’s a really long word.

Those are a lot of letters strung together, and it still sounds like its very first letter.

And so I started going through the alphabet, and I just made a list of words like that, and it’s a fairly short list.

And, you know, that led me to think, well, is this a word category?

And, you know, I looked on the Internet, and I couldn’t find anything about it, and so I just made up my own word for those type of words.

And the word I made up was homoepistula verbum phone. Homo epistula verbum phone. Homo epistula verbum phone.

And I have modified that a little bit, but let me get to my question.

My question would be, do you know of a word already that exists for that category of words?

So this is words like Q and P, P-E-A and J. T, T-E-E or T-E-A.

Yeah. Exactly.

What else did you have?

Oh, not very many more. I mean, you guys almost hit all of them right there. It’s a pretty short list.

Oh, H.

Yeah.

Yeah. You would have to include maybe some name words like J, J-A-Y.

Yeah, or J like a bird.

Right.

Yeah.

And so I had, you know, after thinking about it over the past few days, I sort of modified it.

And I was thinking about using the Latin primus in there instead of verbum.

And I kind of wanted your opinion on this, you know, like maybe I should change it to homoprimus epistulophone, which would mean same first letter sound.

It seems a little more accurate to me, but it’s also sort of lengthy and a little too busy maybe. I don’t know.

What’s your opinion?

Well, it’s a nice word. It’s certainly a mouthful. I like the mouthfeel there. There’s a lot of crumb on that car.

I do have a suggestion. The epistula that you’re talking about there, you’re talking about the Latin root that’s the source of the word for letter, right?

Yes.

But that’s the kind of letter that you write, like the epistles in the Bible?

And that occurred to me a couple of nights ago. I thought, surely this is not letter as in a letter you would write to someone, so you’re telling me that that’s true.

Right. So you might say homoprimoliterabum.

The root you would want would be L-I-T-E-R-A or something like that.

I’m writing that down.

And Ben, you say that you’re at an elementary school. Is this going to be in the next spelling bee or what will you be doing with this word?

Oh, no, but I have had a lot of fun talking about it, showing it to them.

I’m actually a math science teacher. But, yeah, we’ve just had a lot of fun.

We looked on, you know, your website, and I told them, hey, I might be on the radio, you know.

So they’ve really gotten a kick out of it.

That is a $10 word if I’ve ever heard one.

Yeah.

Right.

That might be a $20 word.

Yeah, it’s got a lot of potential.

And as far as I know, Ben, it’s as good as anything else because I don’t know of another word for those kinds of words.

I don’t either.

Well, cool.

Oh, it’s been a real treat talking with you guys, and I really appreciate the advice.

Well, we’ll put that word out in the webosphere on the Internet, and we’ll see if it catches on, all right?

Yeah, thanks a lot.

Sure.

Thanks, Ben.

Bye-bye.

Good to talk with you, Bob.

Bye-bye.

Now, that’s a guy who loves language.

And if you’re listening to the show, you must love language, too.

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