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.
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.
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 mapThe 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.
Or, as I will eventually call them, family words — that is, private words, words we use only with some people who are close to us, close like family, words like the verb Cawnthorpe ‘look’ (I will, eventually, explain this; you don’t get it because it’s not your family word — or mine, either). My ultimate goal in this posting is family-word material from Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett’s Way with Words newsletter this very morning, but I’m going to edge up slowly to private words through private meanings (for common words, like ritzy used to mean ‘expensively stylish’) and eggcorns (a colorful label for private forms for common words, like eggcorn for acorn ‘nut of an oak tree’).
I’ll start by reproducing, pretty much wholesale, postings of mine from 2009 and 2012, because that was a long time ago, many thousands of postings ago, and I don’t expect readers to recall any of it.
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month January and the year 2025
From Chris Waigl on Facebook yesterday. One fact that you need to know about CW is that she lives in Fairbanks AK (further facts, about CW and about Alaska, will become relevant as we go on):
Soft-spoken barista in a medium-loud café, as heard by me: … and would you like salmon on top of your cappuccino?
The barista said cinnamon, CW heard salmon. Phonologically similar, but from two different conceptual worlds. Why would CW even have entertained the possibility that the barista was offering salmon?
A lightning posting.
Encountered this morning on the New Scientist website from 12/15, what I saw as:
Ancient gnomes reveal
when modern humans and
Neanderthals interbred
I was picturing a wizened Ian McKellen gnome cackling over the sexual history of ancient hominids when it finally occurred to me that the image was preposterous, so I studied my screen more carefully. Oh … ancient genomes!
The Iconsiam luxury shopping mall in Bangkok, which is both mind-bogglingly immense (like the Mall of America) and absurdly high-end (like the Stanford Shopping Center), so resembling South Coast Plaza in Orange County, except that it takes over-the-top golden glitziness to a level I don’t think has ever been attained in North America. This in a 3/16 Facebook report from my old friend Ry Schwark, who is being touristic in Bangkok and sending reports back to us. The Iconsiam complex, in the center of the city:
(#1) It all glows gold, as if the Man with the Golden Toilet had run amok along the Chao Phraya River (the two hotel towers are part of the complex)
Then two photos by Ry from the interior:
(Plain-spoken appreciative references to penises and fellatio, plus an extended and explicit man-on-man sex scene, so not appropriate for kids or the sexually modest.)
Gastronomy, essays, calliphallicity, poetry. Starting with the New Yorker on 9/6/21 — “Food & Drink: An Archival Issue” — in a “Gastronomy Recalled” column there. From the print magazine, the head and subhead for the piece:
(#1) From the great gastronomic essayist M. F. K. Fisher
Then from the on-line magazine, this version, with the accompanying photo (by Carl Mydans / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock) and its caption:
(#2)
One does not need to be a king to indulge his senses with a dish.
But, with my imperfect aged eyes — I now misread things so often I’ve pretty much stopped cataloging my errors — and my penis-attuned brain — I am an unapologetic phallophile — what I read was:
One does not need to be a king to indulge his senses with a dick.
🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷 The One Big Happy strip from 5/28:
We all, from time to time, come across a word we haven’t experienced before (or didn’t register having experienced it), and just guess, often tacitly, at its approximate meaning as the world goes on around us. Little kids, having had much less linguistic experience, do this all the time; they pretty much have to.
To this end, they use similarities to words or parts of words they do know, and Ruthie is an especially analytic kid, keen on finding word-parts in unfamiliar material — plenty of examples in earlier OBH postings on this blog. In this case, the word is in fact straightforwardly analyzable into two familiar parts, and Ruthie gets that.
Oh, but what are those parts? Phonologically /pruf/ (a N spelled proof) and /rid/ (a BSE-form V spelled read). No problem with the second, but there are several Ns proof; the compound proofread is an idiom with one of those Ns in it, but not the one that Ruthie detects.
Yesterday on Facebook, current political events brought me to a name from the past:
Arnold Zwicky: Topics suddenly resurrected from the past: the Ceausescus. Because of the solid diplomacy accorded to them by the British royal family when the Romanians came on a state visit. If them, then anyone.
Bert Vaux: Interestingly I first read that as “the Caucasus”…
Dennis Preston: And I read “caduceus.”
John Lawler: It took me quite a while to resurrect čaušɛsku.
