Clark Woodger, the owner of the Nomen Global Language Center in Provo, Utah, which specializes in teaching English to international students, apparently believes that homophones are the smartphones used by gays texting messages with sexual content (“sexting“), or something like that. They are not. “Homophones, as any English grammarian can tell you,” an article in the Salt Lake Tribune tells reminds us “are words that sound the same but have different meanings and often different spellings — such as be and bee, through and threw, which and witch, their and there.”
But when the social-media specialist for a private Provo-based English language learning center wrote a blog explaining homophones, he was let go for creating the perception that the school promoted a gay agenda.
Tim Torkildson says after he wrote the blog on the website of his employer, Nomen Global Language Center, his boss and Nomen owner Clarke Woodger, called him into his office and told him he was fired….
“Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality,” Woodger complained, according to Torkildson….
Woodger, according to a short report in Inside Higher Ed, “denied that he fired Torkildson for that reason, but also said that ‘people at this level of English … may see the “homo” side and think it has something to do with gay sex.'”
People at any level of English may see Woodger’s “homophobia” (the Salt Lake Tribune‘s wonderful term) as political correctness gone wild.
