Archive for the ‘Errors’ Category

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My name

September 2, 2026

I’m attached to my FN Arnold — because it comes from my father and grandfather, who I am pleased to honor. But (as I’ve written about many times on this blog) in the modern US, it comes with a load of awkward associations, and people are inclined to see it as somewhat weird, funny — maybe, ugh, foreign. So they misremember it, as something more palatable to them.

Just this morning alone, in quick succession, I was addressed as:

Albert, Harold, and Donald

I could start a law firm for us.

(Correcting people just annoys them — legitimately, because it breaks whatever kind of everyday interaction we were having.)

This is the sort of thing that led me to develop my alter ego Alex Adams (more postings on that). But Alex is there for (various) special occasions, not for everyday use. I do treasure Alex, but he’s a different guy.

Meanwhile, I have had to learn that I might be expected to respond to pretty much any trochaic male name (there are more: Arthur and Herbert, especially, but I’ve occasionally gotten Aaron and Henry, too). You learn to be flexible. But this morning I felt the powerful surge of anti-Albert revolt. When it came to Donald, I wanted to snap back: CALL ME ISHMAEL, the outcast.

(My father, in these very circumstances, just took his college nickname, Zip (an admirable name for him), and used it for everyday purposes all of his life; everybody, including my mother, called him Zip, and when my man Jacques came into the family as a second son for him, Jacques called him Zip  too. Of course.)

 

 

Posted in Errors, My life, Nicknames, Pseudonyms, Word confusions | Leave a Comment »

cell farming

September 2, 2026

From the annals of mishearing (a continuing series)

Caught in tv commentary this morning, what I heard as an alert about cell farming. Cell farming — the production of cultivated meat — is a real, though still very fringe, thing; the meat-simulacrum is expensive to produce, and many people are deeply wary of it. But there it is.

Then a visual flashed by — of a wrist scored by cuts — and it became clear that the warning was about self-harming.

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Posted in Errors, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Mishearings, Phonetics | Leave a Comment »

Billions of dollars in parrots

August 26, 2026

Little Poll Parrot
Sat in his garret
Eating toast and tea.
A little brown mouse
Jumped into the house
And stole it all away.
— nursery rhyme

If you like the parrots and getting caught in the rain
If you like making love at midnight under the trees on the cape
Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for, write to me and escape
— The Parrot Song

Well, yes, tariffs (by Canada, against those levied by the Grabpussy administration of my country), not my misheard parrots. But I was taken by the idea of billions of dollars in parrots, bright parrots in the air.

And so was led down the psittacine path of associative memory. Some highlights on the path …

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Posted in AI, Errors, Language and animals, Memory, Mishearings, Movies and tv, My life | 3 Comments »

Struggling Actor

August 20, 2026

Having just done two little postings on brief subjects this morning, I’m now going to wade into a few somewhat meatier subjects that have the potential to explode into larger matters of some weight.

The first of these came to me in tv commercials for the Liberty Mutual insurance company, featuring a Struggling Actor character — all of which delighted me and made me laugh out loud. One of my favorites, “Biberty Bungle” (the one with the bubbles), you can view here.

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Posted in Acting, Actors, Errors, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Humor, Identities, Language in advertising, Masculinity, Movies and tv, My life | Leave a Comment »

In reverse

August 19, 2026

Committed in speech, by me, on 7/27/26:

help get through me the day [1]

This is an error in the ordering of the parts, localized in the underlined portion.

[1] is the production. What was the target? What did I intend to say? There are two possibilities:

help get me through the day [2] (with reversal of the underlined adjacent words)

help me get through the day [3] (with reversal of the underlined adjacent constituents)

(side note: [1] is in fact a possible construction, though it’s very awkward, and has the wrong structure: it has through me as a constituent, which neither of the targets does)

Now the question is how any of this fits into what we (think we) know about reversal errors in syntax. There are important generalizations about the kinds of reversals we see again and again, generalizations that can then be used to suggest hypotheses about the processes of speech production; the overarching observation here is that we’re forever planning ahead, metaphorically assembling, in stages, chunks of stuff that will eventually get manifested in speech. Glitches in production are then indirect evidence about what’s going on behind the curtain. Some of them are extraordinarily common, others less so, and down the line, but we don’t see just random word jumbling.

The end of the story is that I have stumbled onto a vein of relatively uncommon reversal types (some of which Vicki Fromkin had already recorded), so it’s worth pointing out that they too are principled; I will characterize them roughly, as reversals of adjacent elements — as in [2] and [3], yielding [1].

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Posted in Errors, Language production, Psychology of language, Word exchanges / reversals | 1 Comment »

Yesterday’s mishearing

August 9, 2026

The headline news yesterday (8/8) was about a Jetstar plane nearly colliding with a Qatar Airlines plane at the Sydney airport. But what I heard from my tv was about, omigod, a Death Star plane. Death stalks Sydney.

Well, jet and death are in fact quite similar phonologically and so are easily confused. Meanwhile, the Australian economy airline is fresh news for me, while I’ve been steeped in Star Wars stuff since 1977. So everything tips my perceptions towards death.

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Posted in Mishearings, Movies and tv, My life, News, Phonology, Psycholinguistics | 1 Comment »

Well-positioned poets

July 12, 2026

(I have so many things to write about that I’m just throwing up my arms and posting about the most trivial thing to come my way today; this is about my misreading of one word from an article in The Economist issue of 7/4/26). The item “American power: Strength in numbers: An empirical look at America on its 250th birthday reveals a country that is mighty — but becoming less dominant” begins with a compressed history of the American economy, from 1820 on. Then (with my misreading bold-faced):

Fuelled by war, colonisation and the industrial revolution, the British Empire overtook China as the world’s largest economy around 1840, when the first opium war between the countries was under way.

… The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and brutal deployment of slave labour meant that the country produced most of the world’s cotton by the 1850s. America expanded, often violently, westward, gaining natural resources that would be the envy of the world.

Sprawling forests supplied timber for rapid construction. Well-positioned poets and the sweeping Mississippi river provided routes for export. …

Much as I love the idea of well-positioned poets providing economic heft — I am something of a poet myself — the actual text was of course about well-positioned ports, not poets. I just have poetry on the brain.

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Posted in Errors, Misreadings, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

Another mishearing

May 31, 2026

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tier tiger for ultimate May, the gateway to the sultry rabbits of summer, those promiscuous creatures of the great queen, Juno (is it hot in here?)

A follow-up to my 5/29 posting “Three mishearings”, with  yet another surprising slip of the ear, eco-terrorist heard as ego-terrorist: model utterance with /k/, variant with /g/, differing minimally, in voicing — setting up a relationship that can be exploited in an imperfect pun, a possibility that’s been ostentatiously realized in writing by Wayne Bradshaw

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Posted in Errors, Events and occasions, Mishearings, Phonetics, Phonology, Puns, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »

Three mishearings

May 29, 2026

(the third mishearing takes us, in street language, into fellatio-land, a place not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

Recently logged, three mishearings of televised reels, two from commercials, one from a joke reel on Facebook, all easily verifiable as to what was said (vs. what I heard when I wasn’t looking at the tv, so didn’t get visual information about the text):


I’m not sure which substance offering body pain relief item 1 came from, but the expression is common in ads of many kinds; Muddy Mat commercials (item 2), for easily washable doormats (especially valuable if you have dogs tracking in mud and dirt), are all over the place; item 3, with BJs (referring to food from a restaurant chain, ostentatiously playing on an abbreviation for fellations), comes from a joke Facebook reel about giving BJs to homeless people, which you can watch here

All three mishearings are surprising if you’re watching the reels they come from; it’s crucial that I was looking away from the tv when I heard paint instead of pain and  money instead of muddy and DJs (disc jockeys) inead of BJs (blow jobs)  — because in all three cases, the intended words appear on-screen.

But still, but still… all three are preposterous; who needs relief from body paint, a mat for the money the dog tracks in, or disk jockeys to give to homeless people?  And worse: the first two items came from commercials I had heard a number of times before, with no mishearing.

And then once I had that first mishearing, it was inclined to be sticky: on later repetitions, even looking at the screen, my mind very briefly dredged up the mishearing, triggering a startled moment during which I corrected course. A kind of information-retrieval earworm, very annoying.  I have no explanation for this effect, and suspect that most people have experienced nothing of the sort, but there it is.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Errors, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Misreadings, Music, Phonetics, Phonology, Portmanteaus, Puns, Rhyme, Snowclonelet composites, Taboo language and slurs | 5 Comments »

Stained by poppies

March 30, 2026

Going past me yesterday morning, a tv ad for some remedy for, as I heard it, teeth stained by poppies (and other foods).

Yes, coffee. With blueberries, black tea, and red wine, a classic offender against dental whiteness. Granting that I have /a/ (in addition to /ɔ/)  as an alternative accented vowel in coffee, poppies is a complex but phonologically unsurprising mishearing; coffee and poppies are in fact excellent half-rhymes / imperfect rhymes:

My morning coffee
By a field of poppies

(with two feature rhymes, both well-attested — (initial) p for k and (medial) p for f — plus a subsequence rhyme, with the final z of poppies against the absence of a final consonant in coffee; for the terminology, see my 1976 Chicago Linguistic Society paper “Well, this rock and roll has got to stop. Junior’s head is hard as a rock.”, available on-line here)

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Posted in Errors, Language and plants, Language play, Mishearings, My life, Poetry | 4 Comments »

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