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?