In writing yesterday’s posting on MLB Pride logos, I intended to type the name Aric Olnes, but anticipated the S at the end of Olnes in typing Aric, and so typed
Aris Olnes
A very common sort of typo, in this case creating the name of a hermaphoditic deity of war,
Aris = Ares (Greek god of war) + Eris (Greek goddess of discord)
On ADS-L yesterday, Joel Berson relayed this story on upskirting (secretly photographing under a person’s clothing; the person is almost always a woman) from the Boston Globe:
Which the highest state court in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court — the oldest continuously functioning appellate court in America — has just ruled is not illegal. The activity as well as the word should go viral.
The decision is that “a state law intended to prohibit ‘Peeping Tom’ voyeurism of completely or partially undressed people did not apply to people who take pictures of people who are fully clothed.”
(Yes, upskirting is a Prt + PRP compound; and there’s now a base and finite verb upskirt as well (of course).)
Berson commented:
It’s not clear to me whether the prosecutors blundered in choosing to bring charges under the “Peeing Tom” law when there might have been some other grounds.
To which Victor Steinbok wondered:
Peeing Tom? Did this happen on pubic transportation?
Indeed.
Three recent mistakes on my part: a writing error; a mishearing; and a misinterpretation of what I heard.
Two brief entertaining items: a typo and an imperfect pun.
Yesterday, writing a postcard (by hand), I intended to quote an old (and not particularly good) dirty joke with the line “How far is the Old Log Inn?” in it, but started writing
How far is the Old Logg
when I saw the error, crossed out Logg and went on with Log Inn.
The error? I’d anticipated the double N in Inn, transferring it to the G of Log; “doubled letter” was part of the plan.
An ad that appeared on my Facebook page this morning:
Ultimate Infidelity Test
Womans Panites & Mens Underwear Tested To Expose Cheating Partners. 100% Accurate & Indisputable
Just a typo — TI reversed to IT — but the error doesn’t inspire confidence in a product that looks dubious to start with. (It offers semen detection and DNA testing.)
Reversals of adjacent letters are in fact very common in handwriting and typing; LINGUSITIC(S) for LINGUISTIC(S) is so frequent that I no longer collect examples of it, and then there are:
Manhattan Calm Chowder
out of the office toady
THREE SEASOSN
Arnlod
iTuens
aslo
The beginning of Tom Friedman’s op-ed piece in yesterday’s NYT:
Israel is facing the biggest erosion of its strategic environment since its founding. It is alienated from its longtime ally Turkey. It’s archenemy Iran is suspected of developing a nuclear bomb. The two strongest states on its border — Syria and Egypt — are being convulsed by revolutions. The two weakest states on its border — Gaza and Lebanon — are controlled by Hamas and Hezbollah.
Five occurrences of the possessive form of the pronoun it here — four spelled correctly (its), plus one it’s. The spelling is corrected on-line (here). The mystery is where in the editorial process it was introduced.
Granted, this mis-spelling is incredibly common, and for good reason, but it’s odd that it came up in the middle of a forest of its correctly spelled (two before it and two after it). Maybe the preceding it is, with auxiliary is, that could have been contracted to it’s played some role in the event. Hard to know.
What follows is an abstract for an academic conference (explanation to come) on “dangling modifiers” in context. This is only an abstract, with a 200-word limit and no space for a bibliography (though I’ll add two items below).
Recent portmanteaus that were intended to be clever: Ocularpation, male-odrama.
In writing to friends about my posting on Harry Baals, I repeatedly wrote
Baals prounced balls
with PROUNCED for PRONOUNCED, an omission error in which I “skip ahead” from the first O in PRONOUNCE to the material following the second (leaving out NO). This particular typo — using typo for inadvertent spelling errors in handwriting as well as typing — has plagued me for years; I have to think carefully about spelling PRONOUNCE.
The effect of skipping ahead is to telescope the spelling of an expression. I’m prone to telescoping, for instance GAY MALE telescoped to GALE (in typing, 11/9/09) and GAY PORN telescoped to GORN (in handwriting, 1/10/11).
Then there’s the case of WITHE for WITH THE, which I reported on on Language Log in 2008.
