deliberate mistakes

[Benjamin Zimmer]

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.


--Ben Zimmer

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