I’ve fallen into a pattern with the old Word Ways features: mulling them over and seeing what I can do different—with special interest in whether I can improve on the old masters or answer questions they couldn’t.
It’s not that I think I’m smarter than everyone else, but I have access to resources others didn’t. And one of those resources is them—remember that old line about standing on the shoulders of giants? To anything they’ve already done, I can add my own spin. Sometimes an outside perspective is all it takes to send an idea further or in a new direction.
However. Sometimes I end up humbled.
John F. Collins dropped this challenge in Word Ways #3 that I’m not sure a 2020s-era wordplayer can meet.
Perennial favorites among the word-wise are…words pronounced alike that do not have even a single letter in common. A striking but short example of such a homonymic pair is provided by YOU and EWE. We have been searching for longer pairs, and have dug up oue 6-6 combination, COFFEE and KAUPHY, and one 5·7 combination, ISAAC and EYEZUKH. Are there even longer specimens in English?
Collins calls these “impossible homonyms.” “Homophones” seems more accurate, although that may not fit either. Kauphy is just a variant spelling of coffee and Isaac and Eyezukh are both proper names. If even that. “Eyezukh” is not found in baby-name handbooks…Googling it suggests it may have been created just for this exercise. We can therefore disqualify it as more a work of imagination than of researchh.
Kauphy is more of an edge case. It appears in only one resource, the sometimes-jokey Urban Dictionary, which is not trustworthy by itself. But it also shows up unironically in this headline and a few other Google results as well as the names of coffee places looking to distinguish themselves.
Collins’ challenge isn’t easy to meet, no matter how creative you get. My first attempt was the variant spellings “Psych!” and “Sike!”, used in schoolyards for ages to mean “Gotcha! [You believed my lie!]” But not only are these collectively shorter than Collins’ twelve-letter KAUPHY-COFFEE, they each contain an s.
Vowels can get weird, but only a few consonant sounds have more than one letter often indicating them. The big exceptions are [k] in c, k, and parts of q and x; [dʒ] in g and j; [f] in f and ph; [s] in c and s; and [z] in z and s.
I could build up the cartoon onomatopoeia KAWFFKAWFFKAWFF for COUGH COUGH COUGH, but that feels like it should reduce down to KAWFF and COUGH, only 10 total letters to Collins’ 12.
Consulting Google isn’t too inspiring either. Once you get past the inordinately stupid AI that it’s got answering questions these days…
THEY SHARE *FIVE* LETTERS IN COMMON, YOU IDIO—ahem.
The only relevant discussion Google serves up for me is this one, which contains more AI-generated bullshit, a couple of answers that can’t get past Collins’ basic one of ewe and you…and one by Steven Winfield that points out a few letter homophones that don’t share the same letter. These are:
C / sea (4)
G / jee (4)
I / eye (4)
Q / cue (4) (but not queue (6) :’( )
U / yew (4)
W / double-you (10!)
I’ve never seen “jee” before, but looking it up, it seems like a legit variant of “gee” as in “golly”—and we can add “kue” to the pile if variant spellings are allowed. “See” and “si” and “eau” work, too.
W/double-you seems like the largest “legitimate” pairing one’s likely to find online, except coffee/kauphy. And that’s sort of legitimate, so I think that part of Collins’ record stands. Although for more creative “Eyezukh”-style pairings, well, there’s always this…
WWW / DOUBLE, YOU DOUBLE YOU’ DOUBLE YOU! (30)
The latter is a phrase you’ll no doubt hear a lot once cloning gets out of control (read the second “you” as a slangy “your” and it becomes “My clone, you’re cloning your other clone!”). It’s best to prepare early for that scenario. You’re welcome, world!
I remember reading about "kauphy" in a "Ripley's Believe It or Not" in the early 60s. I just found this reference to it: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Tea_and_Coffee_Journal/PloeAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22kauphy%22+ripley%27s&pg=PA294&printsec=frontcover
(My recollection could be wrong, but I thought it was about some guy who was the world's worst speller.)
I suppose that SEVENTY-THREE and LXXIII is reaching a bit too far?