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.
Passed along on Facebook recently, a BBC One clip from 12/13/18, with this header:
(#1)
I read the header before I looked down at the scene. And what I read was:
Emperor penguin chicks take on a giant pretzel
I found this mightily puzzling. The Giant Pretzels of the Antarctic? Then I saw the petrel.
It began five months ago, on ADS-L, the American Dialect Society mailing list, with a note from the compiler of the Yale Book of Quotations about a piece he’d recently published:
Fred R. Shapiro, Confessions of the Antedater. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 39.1.23-42 (2018).
An engaging and informative essay about finding earlier and earlier citations for English words and phrases. At the time, ADS-Ler Mark Mandel exclaimed:
At first I saw it as “Confessions of an Anteater”!
and Larry Horn chimed in:
Me too … Indeed, my mailer tells me that when I type “antedater” I really meant “anteater”. Maybe someone should work on a logo
I seconded the suggestion, but then no one did anything until Fred’s piece came up again yesterday, and everybody made the same misreading again — and I came up not with a logo, but with a mascot, an Anteater With a D, the adorable little Silky Anteater didactylus.
From linguist Avery Andrews on Facebook:
(#1) Avery: “My first reading of this was ‘Cthulhu Towers’, indicating that whatever the top-down constraints on my linguistic processing may be, real world plausibility has at best a delayed effect”
To judge from my own misreadings — some of them reported on in the Page on this blog with misreading postings — real-world plausibility has virtually no role in initial misreadings; we tend to notice these misreadings, in fact, because they are so bizarre.
On the other hand, they sometimes clearly reflect material currently or persistently on the hearer’s mind — if you’ve been thinking about cooking some pasta for dinner, Italian pasta names are likely to insert themselves into your peceptions; if you’re a gardener, plant names will come readily to mind, even if they’re preposterous; and of course it’s common to see sexual vocabulary where none was intended — but often they look like the welling-up of material from some deep chthonic place in memory, inexplicably in the context.
The header on the e-mail appeared to promise:
Prison Gay Nite Every Friday in San Mateo – Piano Bar this week
A piano bar behind bars, gayfolk mingle with the incarcerated at the San Mateo Jail. Not really my thing, but I know people it might appeal to. And San Mateo is about 16 miles from where I live, so it would take some effort.
The message appeared in really tiny type on my computer screen, and its actual first word was entirely unpredictable in context, so it’s not entirely a surprise that I misread it. An announcement for the actual event [called Prism]:
Glanced at yesterday’s NYT when it arrived at 6 a.m., and read the headline for the top story:
[REDACTED] Chooses Hawke
For 3rd Security Adviser
As Shake-Up Continues
Ooh, I thought, a bold appointment: accomplished actor, director, and writer Ethan Hawke, a sturdy Democrat, feminist, and activist for gay rights.
Then I looked carefully at the headline and saw that it said Hawk (referring to a hawk, someone who supports a warlike policy in foreign affairs). not Hawke (referring to Ethan Hawke). The appointment was of überhawk John Bolton.
Since my 7/2/15 posting on misreadings (with “Calamities” misread as “Catamites”), I’ve collected six more, summarized below. And there is now a Page on “Misreading postings”.
On the front page of the NYT on 9/11, a headline that I read as
From Kurdistan
To Texas, Scots
Spurn Separatists
This was deeply puzzling: I didn’t think that either Kurdistan or Texas had sizable numbers of Scots, much less ones passionately engaged in the question of Scottish separatism. But then I looked more carefully at the head, and saw that it had Spur, not Spurn. The Scottish issue has inspired separatist advocates in Flanders, Catalonia, Kurdistan, Quebec, the Basque Country of northern Spain, the Veneto region in northern Italy, Brittany, Friesland, Corsica, the South Tirol, Bavaria, the Swedish-speaking sections of Finland, and yes, Texas.
Sometimes I think I understand where my misreadings come from, but in this case I have no idea.
Occasionally I post some observation about language only to Facebook rather than to this blog (with a link from Facebook), when I think the observation is inconsequential. But it usually turns out that readers find more to say on the topic.
So on the 31st, I noted (in “Annals of headline reading”) that I read what I took to be:
(1) A Plan for Less Trash: Turn New Yorkers Into Composers
(a peculiar idea, but the pull of the familiar word composer overrode the oddness of the thought) for the actual headline:
(2) A Plan for Less Trash: Turn New Yorkers Into Composters
(which makes a great deal more sense).
This encouraged readers to play with the morphological resources of English. (more…)
(Penis imagery alert!)
Stumbled across yesterday afternoon, someone reporting having repeatedly misread Pennies from Heaven as Penis from Heaven — something I’ve done myself on occasion (but then I can fairly be said to have penises on my mind more than most people).