Archive for the ‘Errors’ Category

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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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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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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Countermanic Baroque

March 27, 2026

E-mail from Ellen Kaisse this morning, for the annals of mishearing:

— EK > AZ: I got all bent out of shape this morning when I thought I heard an ad for a prescription drug called Vivaldi. How dare they appropriate the name of a beloved Baroque composer? Further investigation revealed that it is called Lybalvi.

— AZ > EK:  Lovely. With you, I am offended on Vivaldi’s behalf.

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The illegal trade in baby seals

March 24, 2026

Coming by me yesterday (3/23) on public radio, a feature on, as I heard it, the illegal trade in baby seals. (referring, apparently, to the seal hunt on Canada’s east coast, in which thousands of harp seal pups are clubbed to death for their fur) But the story was actually about baby eels (elvers). Mishearing strikes again.

Meanwhile, the actual story was alarming, but not as distressing as what I heard, since baby eels are astronomically less cute than baby seals.

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The Vishnu of philosophy

March 12, 2026

The philosopher Bill Lycan (an old friend, once my colleague at Ohio State, a prolific writer, and an enormously entertaining person) came to my mind when a friend was amazed that I managed to write at least one essay a day — every day of the year — as a posting on this blog (this posting is the second for today, and it’s not yet 9 am; I’m on a roll). At least once at Ohio State, a student asked Bill how he managed to publish so much (perhaps, like Vishnu, he could write with four arms at once). Bill’s wonderful reply:

I have a very high tolerance for error.

This was, in fact, a deeply serious reply, worth some reflection.

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Lizard warning

February 23, 2026

Yes, yes, I am bombarded with blizzard warnings, for the terrifying storm now bringing NYC and the surrounding areas to a standstill. But, bafflingly, though I am fully aware that the warnings are about a blizzard, I keep hearing them as announcing a lizard warning — as if I must now beware of a rain of cold-stunned iguanas falling from the trees or an advancing army of marauding Komodo dragons.

Sadly, since we are now in the zone of terrifying creatures, I have to tell you that Gojira / Godzilla is a reptilian (or dinosaurian) monster, or kaiju, not a squamate one (all lizards are reptiles, but not all reptiles are lizards). You should indeed be alarmed by the news that Godzilla is on the rampage in your neighborhood — that means it’s slated for utter devastation — but such a bulletin is not, technically, a lizard warning. It would be a grievous usage error to race through the streets screaming the lizards are coming! the lizards are coming!

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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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