I don’t know whether it’s my eyes, my twisted mind, or simply the fact that I’m usually pushed for time and skimming text, but as I mentioned here and here, I misread phrases all too frequently.
Here are my latest malapropisms:
I was looking for a chuckle the day I clicked a link to YouTube, but I started laughing before the video even started to run. Why? Because I misread its title as ‘SNL Digital Snort’. It was, in fact, ‘Digital Short’. But I think they should go with ‘Snort’ – it’s much more appropriate for funny videos.
Spam is always fertile ground for misreads, probably because it’s so poorly written that I lose the context. For example, a few months ago, I read ‘I got a wedgie’ in one of my spam comments.
“Well,” thought I, “Thanks for sharing, but that’s a little too much information.” On second glance, though, it actually said ‘I got a webpage’. Good to know.
Far more disturbing was ‘…they will be penetrated from this website’. Yikes! Remind me to steer clear of that one.
But no, wrong again. It was ‘…they will be benefited from this web site’, which was less alarming, though slightly grammatically mangled.
And then there are headlines.
I was cheerfully skimming the tech news one day when I discovered the following damning headline: ‘Cisco leaves the consumer networking market after selling monkeys’.
Well, those bastards. I should think they’d slink away from the public eye after stooping to such a low. Where the hell was PETA when this was happening?
You guessed it. It was another Diane Special. The headline actually read ‘…after selling Linksys’.
Oops. My bad.
I knew I must have read this link wrong: ‘Big secrets of how to sell women’ . I didn’t even bother to get wound up about that one. Sure enough, it was ‘How to sell TO women’. Whew.
I ran across the next one on somebody’s blog (I think), but I can’t remember whose. Up front, I’ll offer my abject apologies to whoever posted this. They’ll probably need to slap me if they ever read my perversion of their words.
But I couldn’t help it. It was a slightly blurry photo of printed lyrics. The title was Hero and I read that with no difficulty, but I’m pretty sure the body of it said ‘Herpes’. Twice. Even after peering at it, I had to really concentrate before I could see ‘Heroes’.
The latest in my list would have made me laugh if I hadn’t been so certain it was just another case of my mixed-up reading. On a music website, I read ‘kiss ass guitar’.
By that time, I’d become used to my own screw-ups, so I didn’t even permit myself a snicker. I mean, obviously it was ‘kick ass guitar’, right?
Wrong.
I looked at it again. Then again.
It really did say ‘kiss ass guitar’. Talk about an embarrassing typo.
I guess I should have sent them an email and gently pointed out the mistake, but it didn’t occur to me until well after I’d clicked away chuckling, and by then I couldn’t remember where I’d read it.
But maybe it’s better that way. Might as well share the joy – that website made my day!
Seen any good typos lately?
Author Diane Henders 
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Typos don’t bother me (I can fix them in my head), the typos I have problems with are the hearing ones. For example, I listened to a speaker
(inspirational) but I didn’t really understand why she kept talking about the boys wearing yellow bananas. It was”bandanas”. In my defense she did speak with a Texas/Southern drawl. Unfortunately this was not the first time I have misheard people and losing the gist of the conversation because I was trying to puzzle out what they really said.
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LOL! “Wearing yellow bananas” definitely would have stopped me in my tracks, too. And I’ve also spent too much time thinking “Wait, what?” and saying “Sorry, could you please repeat that…”
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“pouring” for “poring” – learn something new every day. Hemmingway spent a lot of time pouring over his manuscripts.
Letters for Ministers signatures and ESPECIALLY Premier’s signatures are read and reread by a dozen people up the hierarchy. Nevertheless, there is a letter somewhere out there in voter land, signed by Grant Devine referring to pubic consultations. The eye sees what it expects to see.
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Hahaha! I’d love to have a copy of that letter just for posteriors… I mean, posterity… 😉
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Hilarious! How do you know the “kiss ass” was wrong, and not the “guitar”? Maybe it was supposed to be, “kiss ass guerrillas”. Those would be very valuable.
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Oh, good thinking! I could use some kiss-ass guerillas. Maybe I’d better go looking for that site again, just in case…
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I went to a used book sale yesterday at the local library. My wife had said the only thing she’d want me to get her was a book on origami. I grabbed the first book I saw in the craft section. The title was “Origami Scroll-Saw Projects.” I didn’t understand why you would need a scroll-saw to do origami, but then I’m not that crafty. It wasn’t until I was about to pay for it that I noticed the title of the book was “Original Scroll-Saw Projects.” Close call.
Great post, Diane. You’re not alone. Or a loon.
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LOL! “Origami Scroll-Saw Projects” – that’s fabulous! And thanks for the vote of confidence – I’m afraid I might be a loon, but at least I’m not alone. 😉
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N/A
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…so that’ll be a “no”? 😉
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Hahahaha..I was wondering where you were going with the guitar and thought that you had made a typo – “was” instead of “wasn’t”…then I realized you had read it as kiss ass..I read it as kick ass…
Uhm….what this goes to show is that perverted mind (you) + perverted mind (me) cancels the whole perverseness of the reading mishaps…sometimes. Heheheh
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Oh, that’s a good one! So does that mean that between the two of us, we have a clean mind? It’d be the first time anybody ever accused me of that… 😉
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Why yes…I think it would be quite safe to say that we indeed have a sparkling clean gutter….I meant..mind 😉
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LOL! I love the way you think!
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I love to eat tuna fish carousel
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LOL! I hope you enjoy it with a nice crisp side salaam.
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Not a typo but a speako. I was working with some german girls on a fashion shoot in Africa a couple of years ago. They didn’t like me very much (they wanted a nice young hunk to be working with them instead of a crusty old far). No matter, after about a week, one night I managed to get them abit a drunk – just so they would relax a bit. I got a bit drunk too.
Time to say good night and go to our rooms. We were pretty merry by then, and I thought evening had gone swimingly. I think they liked me a bit better. I was biding farewell to the boss of the team,. I looked at her and……instead of my intended gallant satement ” gute Nacht mine Frauline” I said ” gute Nacht mine Fuhrer”!
Well, you could have frozen a chicken on the look she gave me.
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Oh, OUCH! Ouch, ouch, ouch. That, as they say, is gonna leave a helluva nasty mark.
I hate to laugh at the misfortune of others, but you nearly made me snort tea into my keyboard. I’m still giggling…
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Me too, can’t stop giggling either. Next day when I tried to apologise again she told me I had been watching too may war movies!
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I always misread savages as sausages, Diane, but never misread sausages. I can’t get my head around that one…!
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Hmmm, a latent streak of cannibalism perhaps? Tell me, do you ever tell people they look delicious? 😉
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LOL – we live in a small town with a weekly local newspaper. Sometimes
the typos are sprinkled like rain (rein) throughout various articles. I can’t remember any really funny ones lately, I should start making a list :-). Most of the typos are from using ‘spell check’ and then choosing a word without checking the meaning with quite bizarre results some weeks.
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Oh, small-town newspapers! There’s some fertile ground. One of the misuses that never fails to make me cringe (and snicker) is the substitution of “pouring” for “poring”. Whenever I read about someone “pouring” over a book, I have this horrible visual image of… well… never mind. You probably don’t want to know. *snickers*
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About the best thing that I can say, which will hopefully make you feel at ease for the typo’s, is welcome to the club. I do it all the time. I think I read too fast. I think that I have the attention deficet and have had it since I was a youngin’. Back when I went to school, they called it lazy and a slow learner. I am one of those people that, when I read something, I go over it real fast and pick out the words that I want to see and most of the time I read what I think it should say. Sometimes I get in a bit of a situation for quoting things wrong. Hell, thats ok now. I am old enough that I don’t have to explain myself to anyone. Been waiting on your new book. I will start it next as soon as I finish the one I am on. Your books have been great and I have thoroughly enjoyed them. Thanks.
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Thanks, Mike! I’m glad I’m not the only one who makes visual “typos”, and I like your attitude – “don’t have to explain yourself to anyone”. Right on.
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Is it possible you have an astigmatism? (God only knows what you’ll read that as… *grin*) If you do, don’t have it corrected. It’s more entertaining your way.
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LOL! Ass- what…? 😉
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Funny post!
I do the same thing. I once thought a sign read “Exotic fish and dancing.” I cannot remember what it said beyond the Exotic fish, but it wasn’t dancing. My three older sister got a chuckle out of my mistake. Yeah, I had “read” it out loud.
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HA! I love it! That’s exactly the kind of thing I’d read, too. But hey, somebody’s missing a major business opportunity there, don’t you think? “Exotic fish and dancing”?
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They could make millions! 😉
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Two typos to share, both in “free” books, both romance:
The first was about a woman in the kitchen lamenting her lame lovelife. Instead of licking the bowl, she was licking the “bowel.” Ick! If that’s not a nasty visual, what is?
The second one (different book) was far funnier. Apparently there are certain standards men have to achieve if they want to hang out with celebraties and too much body hair is a no go. In the book they said they were going to have to shave his “public” hair rather than pubic. When I asked my husband if he had public hair, he nodded sagely and said, “Yep. I’ve got private hair too.”
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And wouldn’t you know I’d have to include a typo in my post—celebrities not celebreties.
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LOL! That was fabulous! I triple-checked this post for mistakes because I’ve been blogging for a couple of years now, and the ONLY typo that has sneaked through so far was in a post on… you guessed it, typos: https://blog.dianehenders.com/2011/06/22/oh-shift/
“Licking the bowel” – eeeeeuwwww! 😀
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Back in the early early days of cable tv, the channel guide had to typed into the system. That was my job. I consistently typed “The Rockford Flies” – but my best mistake was on the community channel, which I titled “Pubic Access.”
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Bahaha! “Community channel”, you say? I shall (with tremendous forebearance) refrain from making a truly vile joke involving pubic access.
What great typos!
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I used to be a writer for an online magazine, and occasionally I’d be assigned to write about a spa or resort. My manager would contact the company, request that they send an introduction package to me (usually a manilla envelope containing all their latest glossy promos, etc). Then I would contact the company for an email interview. After an interview with a particularly popular southwest resort, I received an email from them inviting me to visit the resort! Wow! All all expense paid trip to a beautiful resort! Maybe this is how Samantha Brown got started. I was giddy. I read over the email a couple more times just to make sure I read it right. Yes, they did indeed invite me as their guest! I quickly sent an email back to them, thanking them profusely for their generosity, and assured them I would be available at a moment’s notice to be flown to their resort. When my husband got home that day, I told him the great news. Maybe they would fly him out there as well. We could have a second honeymoon! I didn’t remember whether they said the invitation was for just myself, or myself and a guest. So I brought up the email and read it out loud. Turns out the “invitation” was actually a “we hope you decide to visit our resort.” Arrgh. Talk about wishful thinking. Or in this case, reading. And yeah, I never heard from them again. Go figure. lol
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Aw, that’s just sad. Maybe you should have arrived on their doorstep looking all happy and eager just to see if they had the heart to turn you away.
Maybe that’s why I don’t run a resort – I’d probably give away all my reservations to people wearing sad-puppy expressions. 😉
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Hmmm . . New career: I could show up at various resorts and spas looking all professional, with my husband filming me. I’d tell the bell hop or the clerk, “I’m CM Stewart, the hostess of the new ‘Best Resorts and Spas’ show on the Travel Channel, and the new executive in charge of fulfillment – the name’s right on the tip of my tongue – is expecting me. Is my complimentary deluxe suite ready?” It’s bizarre enough that it could actually work. 🙂
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Hey, it’s a great idea! I bet it would work – send me a postcard from your first conquest!
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Better not to send the email; then everyone can enjoy the ‘kiss ass guitar.’
But now I’m curious about what you repeat out loud at the eye doctor’s when he/she shows you something to read to check your vision. Good thing it’s mostly just individual letters, though I suppose you could combine them and make a nasty word…
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…and don’t think I haven’t restrained myself from doing exactly that!
My secret vice is license plates. When I’m bored in traffic, I make random words by adding letters. The only rule is that the three or four letters in the plate have to remain in their original order. If you’re ever driving in Calgary, I’m the one sitting in gridlock giggling…
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Sounds like a great way to pass the time. I’ll have to try that with my kids, though I’m scared what they might come up with…
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haha! Welcome to my dyslexic, menopausal world where you have to read everything 2 or 3 times for good measure. Those are hilarious.
The “kiss ass guitar” is something I fear I would have written by mistake. I can never delight too much in other’s “typos” since I’m the worst offender.
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Me, too! Just the other day I typed “pubic” instead of “public”. I proofread obsessively before I publish, but I just know that sooner or later something’s going to slip through. I guess the good news is, nobody expects me to exhibit much in the way of dignity or propriety in the first place… 🙂
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LOL! Yeah, Diane, your typos seem to lean a little to the sexual/bodily side of things. I think that’s a gift. At least you get a good laugh when you spot them.
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