deliberate mistakes

[Wilson Gray]

On 6/7/07, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      deliberate mistakes
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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).

Not to mention that "swell foop" may well be older than I am, in
speech, at least.

-Wilson

>    - 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:
>
> Personal Confuser Tech Support ..... Copyright 2007 Personal Confuser
> Tech Support. All rights reserved. Powered by WordPress . ...
> www.personalconfusertechsupport.com/
>
>    - 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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