deliberate mistakes

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 7, 2007, at 10:53 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:

> On 6/7/07, James Harbeck <jharbeck at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>>
>> >"Cow orker" originated on talk.bizarre
>>
>> I rather doubt that talk.bizarre could be said to be _the_ point of
>> origin for it. It's a common in joke among members of the Editors'
>> Association of Canada, for instance, with no reference to
>> talk.bizarre and probably no members of the association ever having
>> seen talk.bizarre. It's an obvious enough wordplay -- and even
>> occasional misreading -- that one has to assume it has cropped
>> independently in any number of contexts, probably first appearing
>> within a very short time after "coworker" was first written closed
>> up.
>
> Sorry, I should have specified that talk.bizarre was the apparent
> point of origin for the spread of the intentional error *on Usenet
> newsgroups*. At the very least, talk.bizarre was the proximate source
> for "cow orker" usage on alt.folklore.urban, according to a paper that
> Lara Hopkins once wrote on AFU shibboleths.

what the Jargon File says:

cow orker: n.
[Usenet] n. fortuitous typo for co-worker, widely used in Usenet,
with perhaps a hint that orking cows is illegal. This term was
popularized by Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) but already
appears in the January 1996 version of the scary devil monastery FAQ,
and has been traced back to a 1989 sig block. Compare hing, grilf,
filk, newsfroup.

["scary devil monastery" is an anagram for "alt.sysadmin.recovery"]

alas, "has been traced back to a 1989 sig block", with no details.

when did it show up on talk.bizarre?



arnold

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org