A TACK ATTACK,
ATTACK A TACK,
ATTACKS A TAX,
A TAX ATTACKS,
A TACK ATTACKS,
ATTACKS A TACK,
A TAX ATTACK,
ATTACK A TAX.
What’s so funny about this? This one is bizarre, I admit it, but so is the English language. I’ve taken three words and arranged them eight different ways, each with its own meaning. The trouble is that if you only hear these words you will never be able to understand what I’m saying, whether you’re a native English speaker or an English learner. That’s because these are all homophones. The other culprit here is the indefinite article A. It’s unstressed in all the words. Also the same letter starts the word “attack” and “attacks”. This gives us a tack, a tax, as well as attack and attacks. All speakers of all languages depend on their brains to separate sounds and words into comprehendible chunks. Every language has different chunks. For the most part our brains do the job pretty well, but when confronted with a host of homophones, they will break down and that’s what I’ve tried to do here. Let’s go one at a time “a tack attack” means an attack BY a thumb or other kind of tack. But reverse the words and it means that YOU are attacking that tack. Word order is everything in English. Next, we have “attacks a tax”. In this case I’m using the 3rd singular and adding an S to attack, so it means that someone is attacking a tax, spelled t-a-x. Taxes being what they are, that statement is no surprise. But if we reverse the words then it’s the tax that’s doing the attacking as it does every April 15th in the US. The third pair, “a tack attacks”, starts with a single tack attacking. In this cases attack has the 3rd singular S. Again if we reverse the words it’s some person attacking a single tack, perhaps in revenge for stepping on it. Finally we have “a tax attack”, meaning money you pay the government doing the attacking, but the word sounds plural because it ends in X but sounds like the KS ending on attack. And again, if we reverse it, then some people are conducting an attack on a tax. Hope they wipe it out. And THAT’s what’s so funny!
