is now universally spoken,
not having yet degraded into _petr'l_, a future squire will not be
disqualified from airing his wit to his visitors by saying, as he
points to his old stables, 'that is where I store my petrel', and when
the joke had been illustrated in _Punch_, its folly would sufficiently
distract the patients in a dentist's waiting-room for years to come,
in spite of gentlemen and chauffeurs continuing to say _petrol_, as
they do now; nor would the two _petr'ls_ be more dissimilar than the
two _mys_.

[Sidenote: Play on words.]

Puns must of course be distinguished from such a play on words as John
of Gaunt makes with his own name in Shakespeare's _King Richard II_.

_K._ What comfort man? How is't with aged Gaunt?

_G._ O, how that name befits my composition!
Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old, &c.

where, as he explains,

Misery makes sport to mock itself.

This is a humorous indulgence of fancy, led on by the associations
of a word; a pun is led off by the _sound_ of a word in pursuit of
nonsense; though the variety of its ingenuity may refuse so simple a
definition.

[Sidenote: An indirect advantage of homophones.]

It is true that a real good may sometimes come indirectly from a word
being a homophone, because its inconvenience in common parlance may
help to drive it into a corner where it can be retained for a special
signification: and since the special significance of any word is its
first merit, and the coinage of new words for special differentiation
is difficult and rare, we may rightly welcome any fortuitous means for
their provision. Examples of words specialized thus from homophones
are _brief_ (a lawyer's brief), _hose_ (water-pipe), _bolt_ (of door),
_mail_ (postal), _poll_ (election), &c.[11]

[Footnote 11: It would follow that, supposing there were any expert
academic control, it might be possible to save some of our perishing
homophones by artificial specialization. Such words are needed, and
if a homophone were thus specialized in some department of life or
thought, then a slight differential pronunciation would be readily
adopted. Both that and its defined meaning might be true to its
history.]

2. _THAT ENGLISH IS EXCEPTIONALLY BURDENED WITH HOMOPHONES._

This is a reckless assertion; it may be that among the languages
unknown to me there are some that are as much hampered with homophones
as we are. I readily grant that with all our embarrassment of