In response to my posting yesterday on “Thing sliced ham” — “thing sliced [in English muffin topped with thing sliced ham] looks like a nice example of a pure typo, an error in hitting the right keys on a keyboard” — Mike Pope asks on Facebook today:
MP > AZ: To what extent does your understanding / explanation of typos overlap with the verb to fat-finger as used in tech (and possibly elsewhere)?
And my reply begins:
AZ > MP: As a largely tech-ignorant person, I wasn’t familiar with the usage, but, yes, another species of typo.
On Facebook yesterday, Stewart Kramer reported from Grandma’s Restaurant in Oceanside CA (way down south, between L.A. and San Diego):
(#1) [SK:] Thing sliced ham? Thing as in Addams family, Fantastic Four, or Cat in the Hat? None of those seem likely ham slicers, except Green Eggs and Ham. The food was good, anyway.
For entertainment, SK jumps right in with a few fictional characters named Thing, knowing full well that they’re entirely, preposterously, irrelevant. Then, commenters chose to lump thing sliced together with “spelling mistakes” that are misapprehensions about how some words are conventionally spelled, surely not what’s going on when a writer is aiming for thin sliced. Instead, thing sliced looks like a nice example of a pure typo, an error in hitting the right keys on a keyboard.
I’ll start with straightforward typos, where it’s getting the fingers to hit the intended keys that’s at issue, and then work out from there. From Greg Morrow on Facebook earlier today (exchanges lightly edited):
GM: My Dad’s got the 9-inch double-serrated Wüsthof bread knife and it is sweet. I don’t cover it exactly, I just want one exactly like it.
AZ > GM: Entirely beside your point, but I don’t cover it exactly is a beautiful example of a keyboard typo: cover for covet because R is next to T.
“On the anniversary of Arthur Schopenhauer’s birth, David Bather Woods, a Schopenhauer expert at the University of Warwick, recommends five books on Schopenhauser.”
The typo was quoted on Facebook on 2/22 by Wendy Thrash, who explained the intervention of Schopenhauser:
“Because nobody wants to read about Schopenhauer.”
The pointer is to Five Books, a site with book recommendations from authorities; each recommendation is for five books on a specific subject, in this case David Bather Woods on Arthur Schopenhauer:
(#1)
Which inspired me to light verse:
Schopenhauser
Was a schnauzer
A bristly brute that
Played the flute
The author of the little — 67-page — guidebook The Old Editor Says: Maxims for Writing and Editing (first published in 2013), the old-school newspaper editor John E. McIntyre, writing as a curmudgeonly, sometimes imperious, character of the same name, as seen on the book’s front cover:
(#1) The name of this image file is McIntyreOldEdtor.jpg; that fact will eventually become significant
Tom Gauld’s cover art “Winter Garden” in the February 4th New Yorker:
(#1)
A lush indoor garden, in part representing a spring garden outside (narcissus, tulips), in part a garden fantasy (with huge trees, a parrot, a hummingbird).
Gauld — noted for his science-oriented cartoons and his goofily bookish ones — is an old friend on this blog (his Page is here). Meanwhile, here in northern California we’re going through our winter garden phases outside: a succession of spring flowers (narcissus of one variety after another, starting in December; flowering fruit trees starting now; tulips getting ready to bloom) plus specifically winter-blooming plants, like camellias and cymbidium orchids.
(Passing references to various sexual practices, so you might want to use your judgment.)
Today’s mail labeled [SPAM:#####]:
(#1)
The ad copy is seriously non-native English, so liquid pears for liquid pearls is an unsurprising typo, though the image of a man ejaculating liquid pears — pear brandy (Poire William(s)), for instance), pear liqueur, or pear cider — has a certain kinky charm to it.
The text in the video is clean, idiomatic English, right down to liquid pearls ‘semen’.
Follow-ups to my 12/9 posting on poach egg ‘poached egg’: from Tim Evanson on Google+, pouched egg for poached egg (which will, of course, take us to pouch egg); and from several Facebook friends, scrumbled egg for scrambled egg (and then scrumble egg). An egg party, with eggcorning and t/d-deletion.
