For today’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, Linda G. Hill has given us an exercise in homophonia. No, that’s not a typo. She didn’t ask us to write a stream of consciousness post about homophobia. She asked us to write a post using “for,” “fore,” and/or “four.” She said we could use one of them, all of them, or any of them. So I guess I’m done since I just used all three of them.

Just kidding!

“For,” “fore,” and “four” are homophones. That is, they are words that sound alike, but have different meanings, and have different spellings.

“For” is the 12th most commonly used word in the English language. It’s everywhere and has multiple uses. According to Dictionary.com, “for” has 32 different ways it can be used as a preposition and two additional ways it can be used as a conjunction. “For” is quite a handy dandy little word.

At the opposite end of word variations is “four,” which is simply and pretty much only used as a number, as in one, two, three, four.

And somewhere in between, in terms of meanings, is “fore.” It can mean the front of a boat, as in “fore and aft.” Or it can mean in, toward, or near the front. Or it can be what someone shouts right before you get knocked unconscious by getting hit in the head by a golf ball.A few other common examples of homophones are:

• to/too/two
• there/their/they’re
• by/buy/bye
• know/no
• here/hear
• ate/eight

Well, Okay, you get the idea.

Now I’m done.