Archive for the ‘misstated’ Tag

01/27/2024 “Editing”   2 comments

After writing this blog for so many years, I tend to write and read everything six times trying to correct my many mistakes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the norm for other people to edit themselves, even those who are magazine and newspaper editors. It’s commonplace in everyday advertisements to see misspelled words, bad grammar and a general lack of concern for accuracy. It appears that our education system may be partially responsible for some of these issues, and it drives me effing crazy. Here are a few examples of “malaprops” collected from grade school, high school, and college examination papers. What do you think?

  • The American colonists won their Revolutionary War and no longer had to pay for taxis.
  • The air is thin high up in the sky, down here, it’s fat.
  • The flood damage was so bad they had to evaporate the city.
  • A horse divided against itself cannot stand.
  • The U.S. Constitution was adopted to secure domestic hostility.

  • Columbus discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic.
  • Brigham Young led the Morons to Utah.
  • Socrates died from taking a poison called wedlock. 
  • The police surrounded the building and threw an accordion around the block.
  • To prevent head colds, use an agonizer to spray medicine into your nose.

Here’s one of my favorites:

Achilles’ mother dipped him in the River Stinks until he became immoral.

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READIN, WRITIN, & RITHMATIC

01/01/2023 “Malaprops”   Leave a comment

I love sticking my finger in the eye of the American education system. It seems to me to be little more than a means to raise revenues more than educating our children. As in all things the term, “Follow the Money”, remains consistently true. In my early years a number of former teachers of mine did everything in their power to convince me to become an educator. Thankfully they were unsuccessful. I know now that only certain types of people can enjoy a successful career as a teacher and I’m not one of them. I’d love to teach young children but would probably be fired for my continuing conflicts with a multi-layered and liberally biased administration. It’s when I read things like I’m going to list, I’d lose my ever-loving mind. These “malaprops” were collected from test papers from grade school, high school, and college student’s papers. OMG

  • Samuel Morris invented a code for telepathy.
  • Gutenberg invented the Bible.
  • Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English.
  • Solomon, one of David’s sons, had 500 wives and 500 porcupines.
  • There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn’t climb over to see what their neighbors were doing.
  • Afterwords, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Commandments.
  • Good punctuation means not to be late.
  • Adam and Eve wore nothing but figments.
  • When a baby is born, the doctor cuts its biblical chord.
  • If a pronoun is a word used in place of a noun, a proverb is a pronoun used in place of a verb.

I have one more I’d like to add which will be the cherry on top of this educational sundae.

“Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul.”

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