Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Cake Wrecks posting (“Cake wrecks: When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong”) offers eight holiday cakes that misfired, in ways small and large:

Happy Hollday
Season Greeting
Merrychrist Mas
Happe Holiday’s
Meny [or perhaps Memy] Xmas
Let it’s snow
Santa Clause
Marry Christnos

(Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

My favorites are #3 (apparently ‘more Merrychrist’) and #8 (why should I marry Christnos?), while Elizabeth is partial to #7. (I tried to search on {“Santa Clause”} for examples of this spelling as an error in the wild, but was frustrated by an avalanche of hits about the three “The Santa Clause” movies.)

Go to the site to experience the cakes in all their glory and to savor the comments of the Cakewreckers and their readers. One of the commenters, a Canadian, notes that “Santa Clause” isn’t necessarily an error, since that spelling was taught in Canadian schools — and googling on {“Santa Clause” Canada} suggests that the spelling is indeed widespread in that country.

In any case, though the cake decorators are professionals, most of them are pretty clearly not native speakers of English. There’s no reason to think that ability at decorating cakes and a firm command of English spelling should go hand in hand, of course.

This entry was posted on December 25, 2008 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Errors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.