NYT Goofup is a syntactic blend

[Alice Faber]

Gerald Cohen said:
>At 11:52 AM, 3/17/02, James Mullan wrote:
>>>From the Net edition
>>(http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/national/17PRIE.html):
>>"As Scandal Keeps Growing, Church and Its Faithful Reel
>>By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and ALESSANDRA STANLEY
>>....
>>Across the country, in an effort to restore credibility, many dioceses are
>>volunteering to turn over their records to prosecutors".
>>
>>>From my print edition:
>>"Across the country, in an effort to restore credibility, many dioceses
>>after another is volunteering to turn over their records to prosecutors".
>>
>>Pity the subbie didn't catch this grammatical goofup before it made the
>>print version ;-)
>>Jimmy
>
>   The slip-up in "many dioceses after another" is a clear example of
>a syntactic blend: "many dioceses" + "one diocese after another."
>Such errors are frequent in everyday speech, and FWIW I published a
>list of those I had been jotting down for 10-15 years: Gerald Leonard
>Cohen: _Syntactic Blends In English Parole_, Frankfurt am Main: Peter
>Lang. 1987. "Parole" in the title is intended as the eminent linguist
>Saussure used it: anything not in the standard language. I used it
>particularly for slips of the tongue.
>    Most of my examples are from educated people: professors,
>broadcasters, etc.

This particular instance struck me as an uninteresting example of what
happens when you get interrupted in the middle of editing; you've made half
the changes from one structure to another and the phone rings.

Interesting syntactic blends are like the following which I jotted down
some weeks ago (and rediscovered the scrap of paper while straightening up
earlier today). I think this was an ESPN (TV) teaser, but I don't recall
further:

"We examine whether judging at the Olympics can be fixed" (all of the
context pointed at "fixed"="repaired", but, ya never know...)
--
Alice Faber                                  tel. (203) 865-6163 x258
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