… committed by The Onion recently (hat tip to Jerry Zee):
(#1)
Archive for the ‘Misreadings’ Category
A Brokavian crash blossom
May 2, 2018Briefly: a chain of misreadings
August 29, 2016Caught out of the corner of my eye:
Queensland Monsoons
Hmm, I thought, I hadn’t heard of heavy rains in northeast Australia, so I looked a little more closely and got
Queensland Maricons
Well, yes, there are plenty of queers in QLD, but not all that many Hispanics, and anyway, shouldn’t it be maricones?
Then I actually focussed on the phrase and saw that it was
Queensland Maroons
which was even more puzzling.
Briefly: a catamitic misreading
July 2, 2015Another “out of the corner of the eye” misreading, from the front page of the NYT yesterday (July 1st). What I thought I saw was the teaser head
A Love Tested by Catamites
As I tried to imagine how the story went, I focused more carefully on the page, and saw the head
A Love Tested by Calamities
And then I wondered about the history of catamite.
Briefly: A misreading
June 23, 2015Seen (in the NYT) out of the corner of my eye this morning:
The Iron
Dean’s Fatal
Flaw
When I gave it my full attention, I saw that the head was actually:
The Iran
Deal’s Fatal
Flaw
Later it occurred to me that my own mishearings were also mostly collected in contexts of less than full attention, as in overhearings in public settings while I was engaged in conversation myself.
When I focused my attention
Misreading
March 28, 2013(Postings beget other postings.)
People have been writing me to say that at first they misread abutilon in my posting on this plant as ablution. In Google+, Robert Coren called this an “anagrammatic” misreading; this isn’t literally so — people aren’t going to misread glean as angel, for instance — but it’s right in spirit. Three things are crucial: the status of abutilon as a very rare word, one that many people don’t know at all and others see very infrequently; the relationship between the spellings ABUTILON and ABLUTION; and the frequency of TION as word element in English.