“Aunt Ruth, could you pass the pesto pasta, pronto?”

“Nauseating Nephew, why talkest thee like this? The pesto pasta has been past!”

“The pesto pasta has been past what? Past it’s prime?”

“What do you mean, past what? I past it to you a few minutes ago.”

“You cannot have ‘past’ it to me. That makes no sense, English wise.”

“Certainly it does. Is not the past tense of pass past?”

“Past what? Past the end of its life?”

“There you go with the ‘past what’ thing again. Listen, at one point I told myself that I will pass you the pesto pasta. Then, presto, I past you the pesto pasta. Now you’re asking for the pesto pasta, pronto.”

“No, you did nothing of the sort, my dear feminine avuncular one. You passed me the pesto pasta. You cannot say that you past it to me.”

“How can you tell the difference? Past and passed sound the same.”

“Homonymically, they …”

“Wait, that’s not a word. Caught you.”

“Oh, right. Okay, those words – past and passed – do indeed sound the same, but they look remarkably different.”

“But you and I are having a conversation. Who possibly can tell the difference.”

“The audience can. This dialog is being written down for all to see.”

“Oh I knew I should have washed and combed my hare.”

“You mean your hair, naturally.”

“No, I mean my rabbit-like pet, Bruno.”

“You have a rabbit named Bruno?”

“That’s another story. Now listen, tell me about past and passed.”

“All right. It’s simple. Today you pass something. Yesterday you passed it. Today is in the present. Yesterday was in the past.”

“Okay, nefarious nephew, let me try. The football was passed. The age of trying to get the United States to go with the metric system is past. I passed my final exam. My pastor passed me in the pasture. Finally, this past week, I passed around a pastoral print, produced with pastels, of pasteurized milk in a pastoral place.”

“Wow, I think you’ve got it.”

“Phabulous!”

“Uh, Aunt Ruth, we need to talk about spelling …”