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.

An unfortunate mishearing

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

Correction time

From the NYT Magazine 4/7/13:

A March 24 article on preparing a holiday feast misidentified the state from which Cheerwine, a cherry-red soft drink, originates. It is North Carolina, not South Carolina. And an accompanying recipe for braised lamb omitted instructions for three ingredients. An onion, roughly chopped, along with a tablespoon of minced garlic and a tablespoon of minced ginger, are to be included when the dried fruit is added to the pot containing the meat in Step 1. In addition, an accompanying feature transcribed incorrectly a comment from Callie Khouri, creator of the television drama “Nashville,” about what she would put on her Easter playlist. Khouri said she would include music by Pops Staples, the late patriarch of the singing family the Staple Singers. She did not say she would include “pop staples.”

An entertaining mishearing / misinterpretation: the article is labeled as being by Callie Khouri, but clearly she spoke her comments (on the telephone or in a face-to-face interview) to someone who then turned them into text, rather than writing her comments up herself.

One Big Happy roundup

Four recent language-related cartoons from Rick Detorie’s strip One Big Happy (information on the strip here): two with mishearings/eggcorns, one on consonant clusters, and one on ambiguity.

perils of wisdom

Reported this morning by Mike Jankulak from a mailing list he’s subscribed to:

Also Ryan, I had sent you a question on the other group in hope you might have some perils of wisdom to share there.

(Perils of wisdom for pearls of wisdom.) In context, this doesn’t seem intentional, but the question is what sort of unintentional error it represents: an eggcorn, a mishearing, a simple misspelling, or what? These things are often hard to decide, and the perpetrators might or might not be able to shed light on things. And of course the source of one occurrence might be different from the sources of others.

The Telephone game

Yesterday’s Zippy continues a series on the game of Telephone in Dingburg:

What makes this sequence so entertaining is the complexity and prepostereous nature of the seed message, which pretty much guarantees  that the message (passed in circumstances not conducive to full comprehension) will mutate entertainingly.

Mondegreen stuff

Yesterday’s A.Word.A.Day was our old friend mondegreen:

MEANING:

noun: A word or phrase resulting from mishearing a word or phrase, especially in song lyrics. For example:

“The girl with colitis goes by” for “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes” in the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”.

ETYMOLOGY:

Coined by author Sylvia Wright when she misinterpreted the line “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen” in the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray”. Earliest documented use: 1954.

USAGE:

“Since I live in Thailand, the most meaningful mondegreen for me was my own mishearing of a line from The Jam’s Eton Rifles. Instead of the correct ‘What chance do you have against a tie and a crest?’, for years I heard ‘What chance do you have against a Thai in a dress?’” (Richard Watson Todd, Much Ado about English, 2007).

The gay underwear anthem

[Mostly about queer sexiness and gay sex, but with comments on poetic form.]

Heard dimly across the room, a song with an insistent chorus that was apparently about bluesy underwear (or, just possibly, boozy underwear). On my iTunes, but it struck no chord of memory for me. I came closer, and it resolved itself into Pansy Division singing “Groovy Underwear” (originally on Deflowered, then in the collection The Essential Pansy Division). Ah, the gay underwear anthem, a theme song for my underwear postings.