Slips Ahoy

 Etc.
Aug 152005
 

Richard Led­erer writes in the NY Times Mag­a­zine,

As a word-bethumped lan­guage guy, I adhere firmly to the blooper snooper’s code, tak­ing only what I find and con­triv­ing noth­ing. How could I pos­si­bly con­coct this vivid head­line: ”Grand­mother of Eight Makes Hole in One”? How could I improve on this receptionist’s voice-mail advice: ”Please leave a mes­sage. The doc­tors are out of the office or else on the phone and me, too”? Nor could I man­u­fac­ture the sign in an Aca­pulco restau­rant: ”The man­ager has per­son­ally passed all the water served here.” And could I come close to match­ing this student’s sen­tence: ”In 1957, Eugene O’Neill won a Pul­let Sur­prise”? Or this one: ”Ancient Egypt­ian women wore a calasiris, a loose-fitting gar­ment which started just below the breasts which hung to the floor”? For­get it.

”Sir Fran­cis Drake cir­cum­cised the world with a 100-foot clip­per.” The state­ment is hys­ter­i­cally unhis­tor­i­cal, and we have no trou­ble believ­ing that a stu­dent actu­ally wrote it. How blun­der­ful that one young scholar’s inno­cent con­fu­sion of ”cir­cum­nav­i­gate” and ”cir­cum­cise” and acci­den­tal pun on ”clip­per” can beget such nau­ti­cal naugh­ti­ness. This cre­ation is one of the great­est bloop­ers ever blooped.

Read the full arti­cle here.

 Posted by Karthik at 1:15 am

  One Response to “Slips Ahoy”

  1. DoZ says:
    Aug, 15 2005 at 7:02 pm

    Hilar­i­ous! I remem­ber read­ing some­thing sim­i­lar in the Read­ers Digest a very long time ago. This was a piece by a pro­fes­sor of His­tory. “King Solomon had sev­eral wives and many por­cu­pines (as opposed to ‘con­cu­bines’) is one sen­tence I recall :)

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