Is that a bowl of galosh you're eating?

“That's a hansom cab,” you might tell your driver.

And he or she might doff a top hat and thank you for your kind words.

But is that necessarily a compliment?

A hansom cab is a horse-drawn carriage that seats two passengers with the driver perched above and behind them.

So what sounds like a compliment of his carriage might be merely a statement of fact, a statement that would be the obvious to the driver.

I'm reminded of the Charlie Chaplin film “The Gold Rush” in which our impecunious protagonist resorts to eating an old shoe.

Were “The Gold Rush” a talkie, Chaplin would have had a great opportunity to talk about how he was eating goulash, and some wise-acre would enter the frame to tell him he was eating a galosh. That sort of gag just doesn't translate with written title cards, though.

Man, I could have been a crackerjack screenwriter a century ago.

While the goulash/galosh homophone is about as disastrous a culinary gaffe as mistaking a giblet for a gimlet -- an example I talked about last week -- not all homophones or malapropisms can cause harm or dyspepsia.

No taunting zone

Many of you shared your thoughts on those mix-ups that get under your skin.

Reader Cheryl Staats was among them.

“I vote for taut/ taunt,” she said. ”I had an acquaintance who insisted on pulling things 'taunt' and it drove me quite mad! My other distraction is 'staunch/stanch.' I was forced to write to a reporter (at a different paper) and give her a quick grammar lesson when she included the phrase 'staunch the bleeding' in her story.”

Many people are primarily auditory learners. They learn what they hear rather than what they read. This is where many homophone problems (goulashes/galoshes) and malapropisms (“exasperate” instead of “exacerbate, for instance) enter our discourse.

I've written before that horses “champ” at the bit, rather than “chomp” on it, and that one "makes peace" with someone, though one "says his piece" when offering someone a piece of his mind.

Back to Cheryl's bugbears.

A harp string is taut, meaning it is stretched tightly. A taut sail harnesses the wind.

On the other hand, my kid sister would taunt me (when we were younger) by reminding me – at full 7-year-old screech -- when I was on my way to school and nearly out of earshot, “You forgot to brush your teeth!”

To “taunt” is to provoke or challenge someone with insulting remarks.

My sister, I hasten to mention, is a changed woman. She only taunts me – mildly – during games of skill and luck these days. Cheryl's staunch/stanch example is a tricky one, given the two words share roots.

“Staunch” as you likely know it is an adjective suggesting loyalty. “Roger Stone is a staunch ally of President Trump.”

But it can also describe something physically solid: a staunch retaining wall.

Both words sprang from the Old French “estancher,” which meant to stop the flow of something.

The verb “to stanch” almost always relates to stopping blood flow. One stanches a wound.

Heroes

Finally, a word about the staff at the family of papers that make up Paddock Publications.

We were hit with a cyberattack on July 21 that crippled our computer systems, locked away much of our work and silenced our phones. Nightmare scenario, right?

Yet we laced up our cleats, came together as a team and committed all manner of sports analogies to find a way to produce and deliver a newspaper the next morning.

Heroic, right?

Not so fast.

“Heroism” is defined as great bravery, putting oneself in danger to help someone.

Nah, we did not display heroism. “Heroic” is an adjective describing something that exhibits heroism. What we did was not heroic.

But “heroics” as a noun is a little different. Heroics is “behavior or talk that is bold or dramatic, especially excessively or unexpectedly so.”

I saw oodles of heroics on display all week. I expect I'll see plenty more.

Does that make us heroes?

I've long decried the overuse of “hero” as something that cheapens the word for real heroes – people who donate kidneys to strangers, people who intubate gravely ill and infected people, people who run toward trouble with the hope of making a difference.

No one has ever rescued me from a burning building or taken a bullet for me, but today I feel like Paddock employees far and wide gave so much of their hearts and brains and sweat to keep the presses rolling that they're all heroes to me.

With a nod to David Bowie, we can be heroes – just for one day.

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.