deliberate mistakes

Thu Jun 7 16:58:23 UTC 2007

following up on "mock malapropisms" (deliberate incorrect word
choices that mimic classical malapropisms), Tim McDaniel offers some
further deliberate mistakes, from early entries in The Jargon File /
Hacker's Dictionary
<http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/go01.html>.

only one of these, i think, might be a mock malapropism.  the rest
mimic other sorts of mistakes -- inadvertent slips, in fact.

   - feeping creaturism - the one I remembered off the top of my
head,  though I don't use it.  "Creeping featurism", "the tendency
for anything [computerized that's] complicated to become even more
complicated".

this is a mock spoonerism, like "swell foop" for "fell swoop" (over
20,000 webhits; this one is so common i'm surprised it hasn't made it
into the OED).

   - automagically - this one I've used.  "Automatically".

this is a (deliberate) portmanteau, combining "automatically" and
"magically".  deliberate portmanteaus are, of course, very common;
they mimic (the also very common) inadvertent blends.

   - borken, b0rked, et cetera

this is a mock typo (of the transposition type).  at some point,
someone picked up on "borken" as a mis-typing of "broken" and began
using it intentionally for humorous effect.  "teh" has a similar
history.

   - confuser (computer): I've never seen that live

this one looks like a mock malapropism, though it might be a
portmanteau (of "confuse" and "computer").  plenty of attestations,
including:

   - cow orker

probably another mock typo, originating in "cow-orker" for "co-
worker" (by transposition of the w and the hyphen).  though it could
be a deliberate misanalysis of "coworker" as "cow+orker" rather than
"co+worker".  over 30,000 webhits, many of them referring to the
orking of cows.

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