Minimal pair
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I spend a lot of time these days (now that it's June and the long winter is nearly over) walking around Edinburgh alone, letting the architecture of the city and its myriad pleasant surprises inspire and comfort me. (There is pain to be grappled with: my lovely philosopher partner Barbara died of cancer on May 14, exactly a month ago, and the grief will take a long, long time to fade even slightly. Language Log kindly gave me four weeks of compassionate leave.) Sometimes there are little linguistic things to make me smile. There was one today. I had often walked past it but never noticed it before. On St. Stephen Street in the New Town there is a modest little shopfront divided between two businesses, the one on the left a bijou real estate office and the one on the right a boutique selling fancy infusion-beverage products. I don't know if they colluded, or if one chose a name based on the other, but the real estate office is named "The Property Shop" and the adjacent business calls itself "The Proper Tea Shop".
That's what linguists call a minimal pair: the two expressions are the same except for a single contrasting feature, demonstrating that the feature in question cannot be finessed as a matter of fine phonetic detail but must play a crucial role in the phonology.
In this case, somewhat unusually, the contrast is entirely in the stress and meter, as, for example, with the words below and billow (at least for those people who have the same vowel in the first syllables of those two words). There is no possibility of confusing the two names if they are correctly pronounced (though the pun will be obvious to almost everyone). The two phrases are phonologically distinct, and the only difference is which syllable you stress (or at least, the overwhelmingly most important difference: there are correlated differences, like the degree of aspiration of the [t]).
I cannot, of course, open comments, because I know you Language Log readers: you will have noticed many lovely puns over storefronts, and you would be tempted to tell me all about them: pet care establishments you have seen called The Doghouse, or Paws 'n' Go, or Pets And The City, or Grooming Marvellous (all those are real ones in Edinburgh; the pun of the last is based on the distinctively British expletive adverb blooming); or of cutely named hairdressers that you know called Shear Delight, or Shear Magic, or The Kindest Cut, or Cool Cuts, or Short Cuts, or The Hairport, or Looks Ahead, or The Head Office, or A Cool Head, or Streaks Ahead… I know, I know.
But all this would all begin to submerge my modest little linguistic point about the way natural languages don't depend entirely on vowels and consonants because sometimes stress position alone will distinguish the pronunciations of words or phrases.
Pretty soon it would hardly be Language Log at all; it would be Retail Outlet Punning Humor Log. You know it would. This thread would just take over. You have barrel-loads of punning store names you are just itching to tell me about. Don't you? I knew you did.