I was on vacation last week (it was lovely), and haven’t thought much about what I would publish today. So, I looked at my running list of content ideas and one jumped out at me: recently, I saw a headline that misspelled “de-stress” as “distress.” (I unfortunately don’t remember the source and didn’t grab a screenshot.)
Seeing that headline made me chuckle, especially once I skimmed the article to make sure it was, in fact, about ways to de-stress and not something about being in distress or how to distress wood or something.
Funny how two words can look and sound so similar but have (more or less) opposite meanings. And now I think about it a lot when I think, use, or hear either word.
I Googled “homophones with opposite meanings” and found a bunch of examples, but none that seemed quite so relevant to what I tend to write about here. Kind of fun brain-teasers, but very frustrating for anyone learning English!