Six Words: Crevice, Mile, Pasture, Correspond, Offend, Haunt
I don’t mean to offend anyone with this little English lesson. I hope it makes you laugh instead. We’ll see.
Since we got this week’s words I’ve been haunted with whether to say “crevice” or “crevasse”. It sort of corresponds to “You say ‘tomatoh’, I say ‘tomahto’”, so all week I’ve been humming in my head “let’s call the whole thing off”.
But I persevered. I used one of Mary Hermes techniques and looked the words up. Here’s the difference:
“A crevasse, [ kruh–vas ] with a second syllable that rhymes with . . . mass, is a very big, deep crack, especially a chasm in a glacier or the earth’s surface. A crevice, [ krev-is ] with a second syllable that rhymes with . . . miss, is a small crack in something that forms an opening into the thing’s surface.”
Now, it would be easy to write about a mile deep crevasse, or about watching out for a crevice if for some reason you’re walking in a pasture. But writing about crevices and crevasses that rhyme with misses and masses, I couldn’t help but think of bodily functions and bodily parts that also rhyme with crevice and crevasse. I bet you did too.