Yes, I too have questioned myself on "Hangar" each time I see it spelled "Hanger", likewise many other words such as predator, terminator, etc. Spellchecker is my friend.
When I lived in Thailand I agreed to take over the English classes a grad student from Holland had taught for a group of Burmese ethnic minority refugee children. "How hard can that be", I thought.
That evening someone handed me the workbook she had been using, and all of the sudden I was confronted with word like nouns, pronouns, verbs, syntax, adjectives, blah blah blah which I hadn't given a thought since I was a child, and phrases to be taught to the children such as "Peter and Maria went to the market to buy bread and wine". I thought, "That will be just what these kids in a jungle village need to learn". The children I was to teach not only knew very little English, but they themselves spoke several languages, none of which I understood at all.
Well I must say that before securing my mosquito net that night I did what most condemned men do, and prayed to my Heavenly Father for deliverance from my predicament. Surprisingly, I was moved to throw in the towel on the workbook and decided to go old school. Since the people I was staying with received many foreigners each week from around the world, I would start off with the basics...communication, because many visitors may not speak English.
Hangar and Hanger would take a lot of explaining and a whiteboard to demonstrate the differences, yet in a phone conversation there would be no problems, so rather than to go to all of that trouble for English when it was impossible for me to explain in their languages, I decided to teach them first to communicate.
For example, point to your stomach with a pained look on your face, you are saying "I have a stomach ache" in pretty much any language. Likewise anything that hurts, your head, your tooth, your foot.
Make a spooning motion towards your mouth, along with a shrug of the shoulders and a questioning look on your face and you are saying, "when do we eat?" Point to someone giving them the same motions and you are asking if they are hungry. This was really successful because the children knew instinctively what I was trying to communicate, and that any visitors communicating thusly should be directed to someone older who could help them.
I had on a prior visit brought a dozen or so boxes of English flash cards with words and pictures so they could see it and say it, as well as some basic math. This had worked for me in learning Spanish words over the years, and although I speak sentences in Spanish like a child, once someone knows I am cobbling things together they can usually understand me just fine.
Back to hangers and hangars, when someone who is not a native speaker of English speaks to me about Fred, and calls Fred "she", I don't need to derail the conversation to correct them, because the context told me everything I needed to know. For the kids in Thailand, I did spend some sessions showing how words could sound or be spelled alike but mean different things, one that comes to mind is the word "BOW", which I demonstrated with drawings on a white board by drawing the knot, the front of a boat, a person bending slightly forward at the waist, the weapon which fires an arrow,.......my artwork had them rolling on the floor laughing.
Ten years later many of those kids write to me on FB, and we can still communicate, and all of the flash cards are still being used by visitors to help the latest refugee children learn words in English.
. "Thine wrist ornament sparkles with a fire that burns in a likeness to yonder sundial."
ROFL Rick!
Cheers
Gary
