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.
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]
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 riches, we cannot compete with the Chinese nor pretend to have outbuilt their Babel; but I doubt whether the statement can be questioned if confined to European languages. I must rely on the evidence of my list, and I would here apologize for its incompleteness. After I had patiently extracted it from the dictionary a good many common words that were missing occurred to me now and again, and though I have added these, there must be still many omissions. Nor must it be forgotten that, had obsolete words been included, the total would have been far higher. That must plainly be the case if, as I contend, homophony causes obsolescence, and reference to the list from Shakespeare in my next section will provide examples of such words.