Holidays and occasions

June 16th (today’s date) is a triple occasion: Bloomsday, the anniversary of the Zwicky – Daingerfield wedding, and my stepson Kit’s birthday. This Sunday is also Commencement Day at Stanford and Father’s Day.

Brief mention: telescoping

In my collection of linguistic errors (from both speech and writing) there are some of the telescoping, or “jump ahead” variety. Recently, in writing about young men judged to be twinkalicious / twinkilicious / etc., I was especially afflicted by this sort of error, in typing and in handwritten text. The sequence LI CI kept tempting me towards jumping ahead from the L to the I following the C, thus telescoping the sequence to LI and giving twinkalious etc. Very annoying.

Then there’s telescoping as an inadvertent error in speech — for instance, in two instances of Barack Obama inadvertently telescoped to Barama (and then corrected), as reported in this posting.

(Telescoped portmanteaus are also frequently committed intentionally, as in verminfestation ‘vermin infestation’ and teenius ‘teen genius’, reported in this posting.)

Transposed proverbs

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with a proverb altered spooneristically (and a pun folded in):

(A pun on gnu and new and a transposition of dog and new in You can’t teach an old dog new tricks — though a transposition of a N and an Adj is unlikely, though not unknown, in the world of inadvertent errors.)

On the wildebeest, from Wikipedia:

The wildebeest …, also called the gnu … is an antelope of the genus Connochaetes. It is a hooved (ungulate) mammal. Wildebeest is Dutch for “wild beast” or “wild cattle” in Afrikaans (beest = cattle), while Connochaetes derives from the Greek words κόννος, kónnos, “beard”, and χαίτη, khaítē, “flowing hair”, “mane”. The name “gnu” originates from the Khoikhoi name for these animals, gnou.

 

On the mistakes patrol

Three recent  mistakes on my part: a writing error; a mishearing; and a misinterpretation of what I heard.

Another OBH roundup

From Benita Bendon Campbell, three more One Big Happy strips: on questions, compound nouns, and tense in nouns. And then, as a bonus, four strips on Ruthie’s interpretations of words.

The 12-inch pianist

Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:

Size doesn’t matter. Or: Size matters. In any case, an allusion to an old joke.

Spoonerism Day

Today is what I have come to think of (thanks to my friend Robert Coren) as Spoonerism Day, in honor of the famous (and undoubtedly apocryphal) transposition from Rev. Spooner himself: my queer dean for my dear Queen. But what’s the connection to April 30th?, you ask.

Misspelling my name

It’s been a while since I got mail with my name mispelled, but one came yesterday. I had used it to amend a Kristen Bjorn gay porn postcard when I realized it might be fun to post it. So that I could post it on this blog, I’ve blocked out the model’s naughty bits.

This is a keyboard-induced finger error: look at where N and J are located, and where W and Q are located.

Ned Deily notes that ZQICKY would be a great Scrabble word (if it were a word).

An unfortunate mishearing

From Victor Steinbok on ADS-L, a link to a HuffPost Comedy posting with this photograph:

fag bag

From various people on Facebook, this WPA poster with the compound fag bag:

The fag here is the fag of cigarette smoking, though it turns out that there are now two notable uses of fag bag involving the sexual slur fag: for reference to a fanny pack and as a personal slur.