from my inbox

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:25 AM -0400 9/18/08, Doug_Harris wrote:
>Bank robber's note (seen on a Peodigy co-worker's
>cubicle wall: "This is a stickup. Everybody stay clam."
>cats22 (aka doug)

No doubt inspired by the Woody Allen bit in "Take the Money and Run"
from the late 60s in which Woody's would-be bank robber Virgil
Starkwell tries to hold up a bank but after he patiently waits in
line and gets to the teller, she informs him that his hold-up note
reads "I have a gub" and, despite his protests that the note really
does say "gun", the consensus of the other bank customers is that it
says "gub" and the robbery founders.  Not that "gub" and "gun" are
anagrams, but...

LH

>
>The salt and slat thing comes from context and in fact this is exactly the
>type of typo that one makes, doesn't get caught in spell check and breezes
>right through proof reading because, from context (please pass the slat),
>when your eyes see slat your brain says salt and moves on down the road. I
>found the three sentences equally easy to read with the one exception of the
>word "council" in the second sentence which took me like thirty seconds of
>staring to figure out, having read the rest of the sentence with no problem.
>And the reason for that is that I had no contextual reference for a "council
>tax". Even after I figured out what the word was, I thought - wtf is a
>council tax? - then a little ding went off in my head when I remembered it's
>Brit for property tax. In the third sentence I also spent maybe an extra two
>seconds trying to see "negligence" and "malpractice" (my contextual
>references) before "manslaughter" came through and I thought it odd as well
>(you don't usually admit to manslaughter, you get charged with it or plea
>bargain your way down to it). It has often been said (by me if by no one
>else) that communication is 90% telepathy anyway. The words and letters as
>read and/or heard just point the process of understanding in the right
>direction. So the problem was not that I could not unscramble a seven-letter
>word to make "council", the problem was that the context/concept had no
>meaning for me. Had the thing read "ptorprey tax", eight letters, it would
>have been as easy as the rest.
>DAD
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org