In yesterday’s Bizarro strip, Wayno brings us a restaurant that offers a genuine desert — désert — menu, featuring triumphs of food in Sonoran miniature (the howling coyote is a masterpiece of sculpture in mackerel skin, and the cornichon saguaros make a piquant contrast in texture and flavor):
The cartoon restaurant actually offers deserts; real-world restaurants offer desserts, but their menus can fall prey to desert as a typo (a slip of the sort my disabled fingers make many dozens of times every day) or as a misapprehension about the spelling of the noun for the sweet course eaten at the end of a meal, perhaps through confusion with the homophonous verb desert (desért) meaning ‘leave (a place), causing it to appear empty’ (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
So there are three routes to a desert cart: as an accurate name for what the restaurant offers; or as either of two kinds of mistakes. On the latter, from my Language Log posting of 5/6/08, “The thin line between error and mere variation 7: getter better”, about:
the distinction between inadvertent slips and other sorts of “mistakes”: in [the terms in my Mistakes booklet], between INADVERTENT and ADVERTENT mistakes; in Erving Goffman’s terms, between KNOWS BETTER and DOESN’T KNOW BETTER mistakes; in Geoff Nunberg’s terms, between TYPOS and THINKOS (see the discussion in Michael Erard’s book Um).
Then there was the point that you can’t tell what the status of any PARTICULAR mistake is just from its form: the same output can be the result of several different mechanisms. One person’s slip can be another person’s intended production (possibly non-standard, but intended).
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