Archive for the ‘Errors’ Category

Category errors as a joke form

November 7, 2025

Let’s dive right in, to a back-and-forth on Facebook yesterday between Gadi Niram and me:

— GN: Pick a color from 1 to 10. [AZ thinks: obviously, lavender 7 — something that’s both a color and also a number from 1 to 10]

— AZ [actual reply]: parsley [something from yet a third, hitherto unmentioned, category, herbs] … alternatively: Benjamin Harrison [US Presidents] [separately, continuing the Still Another Category theme, Sophie Silberpup suggested: antelope, in the animals category]

[now breaking out into the form of three-part solutions to the mystery in the board game Clue] titanium, in 753 BC, with a ball-peen hammer [titanium, located in 753 BC, killed the victim using a ball-peen hammer]

— GN: You crack me up, dude!

— AZ: Three more shots [each a triple: responsible person or thing, location in space or time, instrument or accompaniment], dude, and then I rest.

Minerva, in Flagstaff, with a night-blooming cereus … a jackalope, in Ursa Major, with John Waters … the ulna, in Narnia, with Moomins

I note that the responses seem to be crystallizing, developing some internal organization, over time. Starting to approach poetry, rather than pleasurable nonsense.

Not that there’s anything wrong with pleasurable nonsense.

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Legal greens

November 4, 2025

🎈 election day in my country🎈 (the first Tuesday in November) — for which I re-play this Jim Benton cartoon:


(#1) From my 3/3/25 posting “Warnings”: it’s all the fault of the Cassandras; they should have made us believe them, they shouldn’t have let us not believe them

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Eggcorns, innocent and deliberate

August 26, 2025

From a reader on 8/24:

Are you involved in collecting eggcorns?  In case you are, I thought you might be interested in a potential one that I’ve encountered “in the wild” (i.e., a Reddit post).  This person wrote jig solve puzzles instead of jigsaw puzzles:

I should have been diagnosed [with ADHD] as a child but it was the early 90s in a poor rural area. Special ed at my school didn’t diagnose me with anything specific … they just told my mom I needed to spend time doing jig solve puzzles. So, I forced my way through. (Reddit posting)

My response:

I certainly have been involved in collecting eggcorns. But there are only so many balls you can juggle at one time, and I am now a old man with not a lot of time left, so I’ve been pretty much out of the eggcorn business. But you will be pleased to hear that jigsaw > jig solve isn’t in the eggcorn database and hasn’t come up in the eggcorn forum, so I might post on it.

And now I am.

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Bad history

July 20, 2025

A while back (7/10, to be exact), two Sacred Harp singers came by my house to pick up the printer’s plate for SH99 Gospel Trumpet in the edition we’ve been singing from for 34 years (a wonderful object that I was giving away to reduce my household belongings dramatically), and like the bright-eyed Mariner ensnaring the wedding guest trapped on his stone (who cannot choose but hear), I engaged them in an hour or so of animated chat, to relieve my loneliness, after which we sang three songs from that Sacred Harp.

In e-mail afterwards, thanking them for their friendship and forbearance, I asked them a strange question:

While you were with me, did you notice anything odd about one of my hands (my right hand, specifically)? Or about how I used my right arm?

One replied:

we both noticed several fingers were bent. I assumed this was from arthritis, so if there’s more of a story I don’t know it or I’ve forgotten.

I then told them a story that I was convinced I’d posted about, on Language Log or this blog, but apparently not, so now I’m now telling it to you too.

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Maybe it’s a plant thing

July 19, 2025

In  my 7/14 posting “Making a mango crazy in bed”,  a surprising mishearing on my part. The speaker said:

What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy?

But what I heard was:

What’s a bedroom move that makes a mango crazy?

The (sex-infused) mangos just dropped in from the sky, bafflingly, with no justification I could see. (Intended [mæn.go] and perceived [mæŋgo] are very close acoustically, but mango makes no sense in the context. )

Then on the 17th it was kapok. Maybe it’s a plant thing.

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Making a mango crazy in bed

July 14, 2025

My life has recently been extraordinarily difficult and extravagantly painful, but at the moment my fingers are up to a small amount of typing, so here’s an odd mishearing to amuse you. This posting is way gay and attentive to male bodies, and there’s a photo (hunky rather than raunchy, but it does involve ostentatious shirtlessness featuring prominent six-packs), so it will not be to everyone’s taste.

In a Facebook short reel that came past me this morning — I’m in need of distractions from the pain — we see two gay guys (both hunks in swimsuits, though of two very different body types), with gay guy A interviewing gay guy B:

What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy? Show me with your hands.

The scene:

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Prediction can override evidence

July 2, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate July, ok a day late, life has been difficult, here in the Dispossession Zone (I worked from 4 to 8 am today sorting stuff in this house to get rid of, this after coming back to life, solid food, and unsoiled clothing after three days of nasty intestinal affliction, so I am one weary bear — but clean, and looking forward to sushi for lunch), oh have I mentioned the construction workers tossing pieces of junk down from the sky (well, the roof), accidentally cutting off the electricity, and generally lobbing bombs into my daily life?

But enough of street entertainment. Time for a brief note from my correspondence, a query to AMZ the psycho/sociolinguist from someone — call them X — reporting on an odd experience that they had and hoping I could illuminate it, and give the phenomenon it illustrated a name.

The event: a speaker — call them Y — reached a point in their presentation where their audience would expect them to utter an expression E, but instead uttered an entirely different expression E′, which was, however, prosodically similar to E — E′ had, so to speak, the same melody, but not the same words, as E — but, with the exception of my correspondent X, apparently no one in the audience noticed what Y did; they seem to have understood Y to have said E, rather than E′, and so showed no sign of confusion or surprise (while X was astonished).

What happened there, and what was that called?

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Nutritional mishearing

May 28, 2025

I posted this query on Facebook yesterday:

— AZ: I’ve been regularly getting a tv spot ad for the Boost Max nutritional drink , ‘Here’s to Now: Boost Max’ (published 8/13/24), in which a young Black man says what I hear as “Here’s to bean meat soup every Thursday” (which puzzles me). Can anyone correct — or confirm — my impression?

You can view the ad, from ispot.tv, here.

Crucially, I failed to take into account the context the speaker is in; I really should know better.

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Afflicted with aphids

April 20, 2025

[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]

Regularly playing on MSNBC, the tv commercial “No Time to Wait”, featuring an earnest and friendly Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (now 78 years old) telling us

I have AFib (/éfɪb/ atrial fibrillation, the irregular heart rhythm)

which I heard as

I have aphids /éfɪdz/

(You can watch the commercial here.)


A screen shot from the commercial; Kareem is holding a basketball just in case you’ve forgotten who he is

It’s immensely pleasing to me that he’s still alive and is doing good things.

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Falling on my head

April 2, 2025

Posted on Facebook by Bill Halstead today:

Come on, supervolcano! Giant Asteroids keep failing us…

about this American Geographical Society posting on 3/31:


(#1) USGS map

The new steam vent is part of a rhyolite lava flow, a type of thick, chunky slow-moving lava. Yellowstone National Park sits atop a supervolcano that provides the heat energy for its numerous geothermal attractions. The supervolcano is believed to be due for another major eruption in around 100,000 years, with the potential to produce devastating impacts across North America.

To understand Bill’s comment, you need to know about the news in this headline from The Guardian on 2/24/25:

Chance of giant asteroid hitting Earth in 2032 falls to 0.0017% 

Which is to say that the chance of this particular disaster is now negligible. But wait! The Yellowstone supervolcano might erupt. Cataclysmic disaster might yet be on the way.

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