deliberate mistakes

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 6/7/07, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> 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.
[snip]
>    - 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.

"Cow orker" originated on talk.bizarre but soon found favor in other
newsgroups like alt.folklore.urban, where it became an in-group
shibboleth. Other intentional mipsellings on AFU include "voracious"
for "veracious", "pendantry" for "pedantry", "morays" for "mores",
"Austria" for "Australia" (and vice versa), "entomology" for
"etymology", and "viola" for "voila".

See: <http://tafkac.org/afu/guides/afu_language.html>.


--Ben Zimmer

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