Wednesday, September 14, 2011

A new series: typos and mis-speaks

As a writer, I'm finely attuned to the use of language in my daily encounters. Or, maybe, being a righter I'm finally tuned to the utilization of wordiage.

Either way, I often come across tidbits and titbids (oooh, that sounds like an adult auction site) where someone in a hurry has mis-typed or said something without thinking. They won't be long posts, obviously, and I will always disguise the speaker.

We begin with a line from an offense report:

"Michael stated that he just wanted to leave the house for a bit and get some fresh hair on his bike."

A wonderful mental image to start the morning.

5 comments:

  1. My father, a former English professor, used to come across all sorts of doozies while reading essays written for his class. His favorite: "Because of their sandy bottoms, tourists come from all over to swim on the beaches of New England."

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  2. Here's one for you: I'm reading the "death watch" blog posts of a now-deceased inmate who was executed by the state of Texas last year. I gather that he was placed on death row for felony murder, where one of his co-defendants apparently took the lead on the "murder" piece of the equation (the TDCJ website also more-or-less corroborates his view of this). Anyway, this inmate was trying to express his view that rather than capital murder, he should have been convicted of "negligent homicide." However, he seems accidentally (at least, I hope it was an accident!) to have written this instead:

    "I believe that I should be punished for the crime I committed, which is negligible homicide."

    Ouch.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think anyone who wanders around with a sandy bottom is capable of negligible homicide.
    Words. . . what are they good for? Absolutely nothing.
    Oh wait, that's war.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The funniest I've seen was (unfortunately) from a child abuse OR, in which the responding officer noted that he was going to make a referral to the "Center for Missing and Exploded Children".

    ReplyDelete

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