Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From Mike Speriosu on Facebook, this entertaining image:

(#1)

Yes, pure bread poodle. A simple spelling error, based on the homophony of bred and bread and the much greater frequency of bread over bred; errors like bredstick for breadstick are very uncommon, but pure bread / pure-bread / purebread in an animal breeding context is surprisingly frequent.

A few examples, with all three punctuations illustrated:

He’s a pure bread Poodle ( Tea Cup ) He is my “Medical Service Dog ”
I have M.S. and get seashers [seizures]. (link)

Anyway Muffy is a pure bread poodle, she’s Penelope’s little dog. (link)

We have an old pure-bread collie that’s really dear to us, but for the past month (maybe 2) she has been biting at her legs and tail raw (and bleeding). (link)

How can I tell if my Boxer is pure bread (link)

if my purebread dog gets stuck with a non purebread dog will this ruin the future to breed purebreads from the stuck one (link) [an astonishing number of people ask this questiom in one form or another]

Meanwhile, the pun in pure bread dog is out there to be used, and at least one cartoonist has snapped it up:

(#2)

I.B. Nelson is Bill Nelson, whose website says he does “Web Development, Graphics, Personal Journal, Cartoons”. The New Breed strip has various contributors; Nelson has drawn a number of other strips (The Darkside, The Nutthouse, Trev ’n’ Trav, etc.) on his own.

This entry was posted on July 29, 2013 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Errors, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Spelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.