ned
as homophones.

_Continent_, adjective and substantive, is an example of absolute
divergence of meaning, inherited from the Latin; but as they are
different parts of speech, I allow their plea of identical derivation
and exclude them from my list. On the other hand, the substantive
_beam_ is an example of such a false homophone as I include. _Beam_
may signify a balk of timber, or a ray of light. Milton's address to
light begins

O first created beam

and Chaucer has

As thikke as motes in the sonne-beam,

and this is the commonest use of the word in poetry, and probably in
literature: Shelley has

Then the bright child the plumed seraph came
And fixed its blue and beaming eyes on mine.

But in Tyndal's gospel we read

Why seest thou a mote in thy brother's eye and perceivest not
the beam that is in thine own eye?

The word beam is especially awkward here,[3] because the beam that
is proper to the eye is not the kind of beam which is intended.
The absurdity is not excused by our familiarity, which Shakespeare
submitted to, though he omits the incriminating eye:

You found his mote; the king your mote did see,
But I a beam do find in each of three.

[Footnote 3: It is probable that in Tyndal's time the awkwardness was
not so glaring: for 'beam' as a ray of light seems to have developed
its connexion with the eye since his date, in spite of his proverbial
use of it in the other sense.]

And yet just before he had written

So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not
To those fresh morning drops upon the rose,
As thy eye-beams when their fresh rays have smote
The night of dew that on my cheeks down flows.

Let alone the complication that _mote_ is also a homophone, and
that outside Gulliver's travels one might as little expect to find a
house-beam as a castle-moat in a man's eye, the confusion of _beam_
is indefensible, and the example will serve three purposes: first to
show how different significations of the same word may make practical
homophones, secondly the radical mischief of all homophones, and
thirdly our insensibility towards an absurdity which is familiar: but
the absurdity is no less where we are accustomed to it than where it
is unfamiliar and shocks us.

[Sidenote: Tolerance due to habit.]

And we are so accustomed to homophones in English that they do not
much offend us; we do not imagine their non-existence, and most people
are probably unaware of their inco