A Homophone Rerun from the Summer of 2014: Nomen Global.

Sitting on a park bench on Center Street in Provo by the City Center yesterday, I watched as Clarke Woodger made his way across the street to go into City Hall. I hadn't seen him since he fired me back in July of 2014 over a misunderstanding about the word 'homophone.' I nodded at him; he nodded at me, and said "Hot out today, isn't it?" To which I replied: "Sure is." Then he was gone into the bowels of City Hall.

For those of you who never heard the tale of the consequences of my firing, let me rerun the Salt Lake Tribune article that Paul Rolly did on my predicament. Just for nostalgic laughs, you understand:

Paul Rolly: Blogger fired from language school over 'homophonia' 

Homophones, as any English grammarian can tell you, 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.

This concept is taught early on to foreign students learning English because it can be confusing to someone whose native language does not have that feature.

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.

As Torkildson tells it, Woodger said he could not trust him and that the blog about homophones was the last straw.

"Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality," Woodger complained, according to Torkildson, who posted the exchange on his Facebook page.

Torkildson says he was careful to write a straightforward explanation of homophones. He knew the "homo" part of the word could be politically charged, but he thought the explanation of that quirky part of the English language would be educational.

Nomen has removed that blog from its website, but a similar explanation of homophones was posted there in 2011 with apparently no controversy.

Woodger says his reaction to Torkildson's blog has nothing to do with homosexuality but that Torkildson had caused him concern because he would "go off on tangents" in his blogs that would be confusing and sometimes could be considered offensive.

Nomen is Utah's largest private English as a Second Language school and caters mostly to foreign students seeking admission to U.S. colleges and universities. Woodger says his school has taught 6,500 students from 58 countries during the past 15 years. Most of them, he says, are at basic levels of English and are not ready for the more complicated concepts such as homophones.

"People at this level of English," Woodger says, " … may see the 'homo' side and think it has something to do with gay sex."

He says Torkildson had worked at the center for less than three months before he was terminated in mid-July.

Interestingly, he was hired on April Fools' Day.

—