The Captain and I just had a reading from the dictionary, and I burst out laughing not once, not twice, but three times! Here are the culprits:

people – Creatures walking around on two legs are people, unless they are bears. It is usually fairly easy to tell which are people. People means humans. You are a human. One human is a person. A bunch of persons are people.

permission – If you ask your parents to let you go to Africa to hunt penguins, you ask for their permission. If they give you their permission, they permit you to go. It’s not very likely they will give their permission. Penguins do not live in Africa. They live near the South Pole.

picture – A picture is a drawing or photograph of something. You could draw a picture of your favorite pork chop, or you could use a camera to take a picture of it. Whichever way you do it, people could look at your picture and say, “Wow, that’s a great pork chop!”

Oh, Mr. Ertel, you rooster-hating, pork-chop-loving, hilarious dude, you.