Random late night/early morning thoughts

When Your Brain is in Hyper-drive

😄 Humor | by Guy Saldiveri | 02/16/2026

Lying in bed, awake at hours that birds are still huddled together—and me just thinking.

Yeah, that's probably not the best thing to be doing at that time. Wide awake, brain in high gear, throttle wide open, thoughts come streaming through.

Wondering if I shouldn't start a second blog—Sal's-Random-Thought-Emporium—enter at your own risk. To be honest, I'm not even sure I would want to go in there—some scary stuff lurking behind those brown eyes.

This time though, not scary, just interesting. Wide awake and thinking about words—thinking about writing.

Something that I wrote that was corrected—Segway is a scooter—segue is the word you want. Segways get you from block to block. Segues get you from idea to idea. I have a car for the first one—I want the second. I’ve been riding that mistake for years.

So, it pops in my head—Why do we have homonyms—or are they homophones? I always get them confused. I mean the English language is weird enough—scratch that—LANGUAGE is weird enough. Do we really have to throw in those crazy words that sound exactly the same but mean completely different things?

I've read books; I've even read red books. Without context… there—their—they're… hmm no wonder people have such a hard time spelling.

I remember as a kid, growing up in my house—Italian neighborhood; I had an aunt that I adored. I used to give her a hard time because she understood Italian, but never taught me. She used to tell me she was fluent in Italian, but only in her head. She understood it, she could think it, but she couldn't speak it. I never understood that then—I do now.

We have to train our bodies to speak. Words form in our heads, but what are words? Just sounds grouped together in a certain way, consistently produced by the same pattern that we all remember.

But putting that pattern together requires thought AND muscle.

Thoughts start it and then the brain controls the muscles. The enzymes flow, muscles contract, the jaw moves, the tongue goes to the correct spot. The lungs get ready to expel the right amount of air. The teeth align, and sound comes out—one syllable at a time.

There's a lot going on there. Do we really need to confuse it even more?

Well, thinking about that just now, after writing that last paragraph, maybe—just maybe—homonyms (or homophones) are actually a good thing.

There's a lot of work involved in producing the word read. The same work that's involved in producing the word reed. One is a verb meaning to take in what's written, one is a noun (why isn't that spelled nown?) describing something that grows in a marshy area.

It also makes me wonder why my cat needs to knead all the time. That's another one. Why is that K silent? It should be KaNead—my cat needs to KaNead…

Makes me think of another story from my youth—this time about my grandmother. Cooking dinner, out of pasta, sends me to the store for nyorkee (Ny-ork-EE). Guess what: I can't find it. Know why? It's because nothing in that store was spelled anything like nyorkee. It starts with a G. Yep, and it's actually spelled gnocchi. Yeah, like I was supposed to know that….

Anyway, it's all (or mostly) contextual; we understand the language because of content. Homonyms, while annoying, are actually good guys in the sense they are there to provide us less work and effort to communicate. They do, however, create havoc when trying to spell…

Anyway, these random thoughts… Could make a good blog… Maybe…