Every day people speaking English ask one another questions like these: "Did you say seventy or seventeen?", "Did you say that you can come or that you can't?" Similar-sounding words can be especially confusing for people who speak English as a second language. When a Korean woman who lives in the United States arrived at work one morning, her boss asked her, "Did you get a plate?" "No...," she answered, wondering what in the world he meant. She worked in an office. Why did the boss ask her about a plate? All day she wondered about her boss's strange question, but she was too embarrassed to ask him about it. At five o'clock, when she was getting ready to go home, her boss said, "Please be on time tomorrow. You were 15 minutes late this morning." "Sorry," she said. "My car wouldn't start, and..." Suddenly she stopped talking and began to smile. Now she understood.