From John L. Allen Jr., “The Pope’s Real Message for Obama”, NYT op-ed piece of 12/19/08:
Ninety-four percent of the Catholics in the world are not Americans, which may help explain why the pope and his lieutenants are not always think American thoughts when they get out of bed in the morning.
A classic cutnpaste error, in which the writer starts one version (probably “do not always think American thoughts” in this case) and then the writer, or an editor, thinks of an improvement (“are not always thinking American thoughts”) but changes only part of the first version, so producing a combination of the two versions. (The on-line version has the error corrected, to “are not always thinking”.) I have a small collection of these things, and they’ve come up every so often on Language Log, most recently in a posting by Geoff Pullum, here. Here’s the summary for 2008.
