This is a story of mistaken identity.
Today in class, my students were working in groups, playing a review game to prepare for their upcoming test on John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The game platform, called Kahoot! (I learned about it at a VDOE conference and highly recommend it; the students love it), is online, so I had procured one of our school’s mobile laptop carts for my students’ use. As I was passing out the machines, I heard one of my students exclaim, “They used the wrong cords!” I had used the cart the previous block, and noticed nothing about the cords that seemed out of the ordinary. I examined the tangled mass of chargers in the cart to see if I could discern the problem.
“What do you mean, they used the wrong cords?” I asked, addressing no one in particular. “They look fine to me.”
The same student who had proclaimed the error in the first place explained, “They used the music chords!”
Still puzzled, I continued to wordlessly examine the charger cords in the cart.
“I mean,” I said, “all the laptops seem to be charging just fine. How are these the wrong cords?”
“Cord” without an “H” refers to an electrical cord, such as is part of a charger for, say, a laptop. “Chord” with an “H” refers to musical chords, as in, “Play me a few chords, Maestro!”
After another minute or two of beffudlement, one of my students realized where the confusion originated: I was looking at the actual cords in the cart; my student was reading a sign on the front of the cart, which said, in part:
“Please be sure all chords are neatly stored inside the cart.”
Ah! My student had noticed and was perturbed by something that would, had I noticed the sign in the first place, also have perturbed me: the misspelling of a homophone.
“Cord” without an “H” refers to an electrical cord, such as is part of a charger for, say, a laptop. “Chord” with an “H” refers to musical chords, as in, “Play me a few chords, Maestro!”
No doubt the fact that the student who pointed this mistake out is one of our band students played a role in his quick discernment of the error. Still, as his English teacher, I was proud of his sharp eye.