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).
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.
(Postings beget other postings.)
People have been writing me to say that at first they misread abutilon in my posting on this plant as ablution. In Google+, Robert Coren called this an “anagrammatic” misreading; this isn’t literally so — people aren’t going to misread glean as angel, for instance — but it’s right in spirit. Three things are crucial: the status of abutilon as a very rare word, one that many people don’t know at all and others see very infrequently; the relationship between the spellings ABUTILON and ABLUTION; and the frequency of TION as word element in English.
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.
Passed on by Peter Korn on Google+, this enthusiastically crude video:
Some explanation:
Norwegian Song Explains How Bigger Is Better
Not everything is bigger in America!
Kollektivet, (Norway’s version of The Lonely Island) made this music video which explains how everything is bigger and better in America, except for one thing… (link)
… the alphabet. The Norwegian spelling system has the 26 letters English has, plus, tacked on to the end of the alphabet, Æ Ø Å, so it beats out English in the alphabet-size competition. Consequently, the song is known as “The Aeoa song”, or ”Size Matters”. To further highlight the extras, the site above credits music and lyrics to the performers,
Fridtjof StensÆth Josefsen and Jakob SchØyen Andersen
In written Nowegian, since these three characters count as distinct letters, they have their own place in alphabetizing. Something similar is true in Spanish and Welsh orthography (some details here). But in other orthographies, like German and French, extra symbols are treated as variants of the basic letters — as a basic letter plus a diacrfitic, or as a sequence of basic letters.
So: German has three umlauted vowel letters – Ä Ö Ü – plus the ligature ß (called Esszet), but these don’t count as “letters of the alphabet” and play no role in alphabetization: the umlauted vowel letters count as variants of A O U, respectively, and ß is treated just like the sequence ss. In French, the five diacritics (acute accent, grave accent, circumflex accent, diaeresis, cedilla) are ignored in alphabetization, and the ligatures Œ and Æ are treated as OE and AE, respectively. Note the difference in the way Norwegian and French treat the symbol Æ.
These are entirely matters of convention, so (as I pointed out in the earlier posting) they can change over time).
From Roy Calfas on Facebook, who got it from Captain Grammar Pants:
Commenter Ilene Giambastiani on the Captain Grammar Pants Facebook site:
They could spell apple and butter, but they couldn’t figure out how to spell home? Boggles the mind.
Well, actually, the question is: how do you spell /hòméd/ (which is how most people pronounce homemade / home-made most of the time)?
Today’s Bizarro, on geese around the world:
A little play on spelling conventions: the default spelling for the phoneme /v/ of English and French is V, but the spelling for the phoneme /v/ of German is W. So Canadian geese — note that this is a type name; Canada geese (sometimes called Canadian geese) are by no means limited to Canada, and other goose species, for example the snow goose, are found in Canada — will fly in a V formation, while German geese (this is not a type name) will fly in a double V formation, making a W. But only if the German geese know how to spell in German.
Passed on by Edith Maxwell on Facebook, this New Yorker cartoon by Jack Ziegler:
Misspellings on menus have many sources. Many are typos of the simplest sort (inadvertent transpositions, anticipations, perseverations, etc.), and a great many are “ear spellings”, as Ceasar salad probably is here. Some are generalizations from the spelling of other expressions, as the hyphenated osso-buco might be here (cf. chaud-froid).
Some people annoy restaurateurs by writing corrections in on the menus. Others just complain. I have yet to see someone refuse to order a dish because its name was misspelled on the menu, or walk out of a restaurant because of its spelling, but who knows what spelling rage might do to people?
Passed on from the Archaeosoup site (via Facebook), this New Yorker cartoon (1/26/63) by Ed Fisher:
This tickles archaeologists’ funny bones. And epigraphers’, of course.
