homophones confuse anyone else ?

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As I become more selfaware,I realize the issues I face and homophones seem to be a big trigger .

My Mon said earlier "you have to use disstiled water in irons " and my brain kept thinking of iron then to moculars and after she repeated her self I went to clothing iron .

That while time I was in a stare for like 10 seconds.


Same thing the other day when my brother called mazarella sticks cheese sticks , like I know their interchangable but my mind just gets confused

'Iron' and 'iron' are only homophones because they're the same word, but the the ironing iron's case it is used as a metonymy. 'Mozzarella sticks' and 'cheese sticks' are not homophones at all. I know I'm being pedantic. Sorry. You might want to know though
I think getting confused by words with similar multiple meanings or synonyms used with little context is relatively common. Do you say they are a trigger because they elicit more than just confusion?

There are many homophones in English.

I get the feeling there aren't that many in Italian.

Actually, there are some, but not many due to the fact that there is a strong corrispondence between phonemes and graphemes. For instance 'cieco' can mean both caecum and blind (which makes these two homonyms) while 'ceco', which sounds exactly the same, means Czech.

Things like that have definitely happened to me before, but I wouldn't say that it's common. It doubt it would happen to me if the conversation beforehand had been about clothing, for instance. Although it could have if I hadn't been paying attention to the conversation.
When it does happen I pause but then will generally vocalize something like.. "? What are you talking about, you aren't making any sense" etc. Then I realize it or they tell me and I'm like 'duh, that was stupid', and I laugh at myself and move on.

At some point in my life I learned that it's generally not embarrassing to not understand or know something, and that if someone wants to talk to me about something, I interrupt them and get them to clarify what they're talking about. People around me talk about movies and actors, actresses, pop culture etc a lot, things I don't retain information about because it's not very interesting to me, so I get them to explain things more to me quite often.

But I'm also in a place where I don't have to ask for explanations in everyday conversation. I don't get mixed up with homophones much and I don't think I often get mixed up with things like 'mozarella sticks' vs 'cheese sticks'. One of the reasons I probably don't get mixed up with those things is because I'm the person who's constantly calling one thing another thing because I cannot think of the correct word for it, so I mentally grab at any similar word and throw it into my speech before I also forget the entirety of what I was saying (which also happens fairly often.) The more explicit a name is for something, the less likely I'll be able to find it and use it, and if I do find it it will likely take time such that my sentence is interrupted.

I don't think they "confuse" me, but they do sometimes result in a delay like you describe. Every spoken sentence, each sequence of sounds is like a puzzle for me - the best comparison I have is it feels like a lock-picking mini-game from a videogame.



Each word is like a tumbler, and I have to find the right meaning to unlock it. With homophones it can be more difficult to find that meaning, and might take me a bit longer.