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As a fan of surreal absurd humour, I love unintentional funnies that result from text being cut off or truncated at just the wrong place.
For instance, the "Doomsday Cod" - visions of small fish weaving menacingly towards you... you'll never get awaaaaaay!
I just spotted another one today, pictured above, where Twitterfox cut off text from a Twitter update (tweet, twitter, twit or whatever you wanna call it).
For screenreaders & search indexing bots - it said:
"Airbag jacket 'could save lives': Dozens of lives could be saved every year if motorbike airbag jackets were mad.."
Telling Alaric about the wonderful books of Richard Lederer (official site), which no lover of English language puns and mistakes can be without, inspired me to look for online examples of his famous collections of bloopers - notably humorous errors from children’s history essays / exams which he’d painstakingly put together to hilarious effect.
I was delighted to find lots of them. Here are my fave Lederer links, on history, music etc – enjoy!
Unofficial history of the world (excerpts: Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies… A myth is a female moth… Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock… Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them… During this time, people put on morality plays about ghosts, goblins, virgins, and other mythical creatures… The government of England was a limited mockery. From the womb of Henry VIII Protestantism was born. He found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee… Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted "hurrah."…)
The revised non-standard bible (excerpts: The first five books of the Bible are Genesis, Exodus, Laxatives, Deuteronomy, and Numbers… Saddam and Gomorrah were twins... The Seventh Commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery… The greatest miracle in the Bible is when Joshua told his son to stand still and he obeyed him… He preached holy acrimony, which is another name for marriage. A Christian should have only one wife. This is called monotony…)
American history, the unofficial version (excerpts: Christopher Columbus discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic… Finally, the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis… Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of independence, which says that all men are cremated equal and are well endowed by their creator… The difference between a king and a president is that a king is the son of his father, but a president isn't. Washington was a very social man. He had big balls, and everyone enjoyed them… Lincoln debated John Kennedy in 1960. Kennedy won because he looked better than Lincoln, who had pallor due to his assassination… Thomas Edison invented the pornograph, and Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick Raper, which did the work of a hundred men… World War I made the people so sad that it brought on the Great Depression. Then the New Deal tried to make sure that the stock market will never happen again… the Watergate Scandal, which ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.)
Shakespeare according to students (excerpts: He lived at Windsor with his merry wives, writing hysterectomies, tragedies, comedies, and errors… In one of Shakespeare's famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy… During the banquet scene, Lady Macbeth is afraid her husband will expose himself in front of his guests. Then Lady Macbeth gets kilt… Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet… In Anthony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra reclined to become Mark Anthony's mistress. She took the Roman Empire one man at a time… The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained...)
Classical music stuff (excerpts: The principle singer of 19th-century opera was called pre-Madonna. At one time, singers had to use musicians to accompany them. Since synthesizers came along, singers can now play with themselves… A virtuoso is a musician with real high morals… I know what a sextet is but I'd rather not say… Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between, he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic… Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. Beethoven was so deaf he wrote loud music…)
However, I am really starting to hate the following two eggcorns because I now see them everywhere, and I'm starting to mutter or scream "Get it right, willya?!" more often than is probably good for me, or anyone else in my vicinity:
"free reign" (it should be free rein, dammit! though according to the Eggcorns Database it's so commonly misused that it's effectively now mainstream)
For native English speakers trying to learn how to pronounce French, German or Spanish properly - e.g. singers wanting to sing an aria from an opera or lieder or song in a different language, or just to learn to speak the language - after some time fiddling with audio dictionaries I figured out that the quickest and best way, short of having access to someone who speaks the language and is willing to give you the pronunciation s-l-o-w-l-y, is to try this trick: use AT&T's brilliant free online "Natural Voices" speech to text demo service.
Choose the desired language and gender from the dropdown, e.g. if you're a female wanting to learn to pronounce a French aria, pick Juliette.
Note: for Spanish there's only Latin American Spanish, not "pure" Spanish. I'm not sure of the differences but to me it's better than not having any guide at all.
Paste the text of you want to hear pronounced (e.g. the lyrics or libretto from the aria or song concerned) into the text box.
Tip: don't use a new line, it doesn't recognise them; use commas or full stops instead to break up different phrases, and make sure you put a space after the comma or period or it won't be recognised either.
Click Speak or Download.
Tip: even if you click Speak, you can later go back and click Download to save the WAV file of the pronounciation to your computer to replay later; and in fact I'd recommend saving the sound file so you can play it back later to help you learn it.
Note: there's a 300 character max limit (that's partly why I suggest not using new lines, just punctuation, as new lines don't pause the speech but seem to count to the limit). Tip: get round that by splitting the text up into chunks. Save the files as flowerduet1, flowerduet2, etc, and then listen to them separately, or if you prefer you can use the free open source audio editing software Audacity to copy and paste all of 2 to the end of 1, then export a new file of the combined version to WAV or MP3 (having used the Amplify effect first, if you wish; you can even use the Tempo effect to slow it down so you can follow it more easily. That effect is useful as the AT&T end product goes at quite a lick, especially in German! But the tempo change can introduce some distortion - I found 10% slower seems to do me fine, but just experiment and preview to get what works for you).
Also note that A&T have made this demo available for private non-commercial use only.
Obviously it's a bit artificial, it's clearly not perfect (listen to how it pronounces English and you'll see what I mean), but it's way better than what I'd be able to do by myself, and much faster than using an audio dictionary.
Of course, non-native English speakers could also use it to learn songs in English too.
Here's one I made earlier to help pronounce French - it's the combined, amplified and slowed down version, of the 2nd soprano words anyway (click the arrow to play online, the title to download - 283kb): pronunciation of Delibes' Flower Duet from Lakme.
Perhaps some kind French speaker could confirm how accurate it is (or not)??
BBC newsreaders have for years pronounced "Beijing" wrongly, with a French j. (It's actually Bei as in eBay, jing as in jingle.) They ought to know better, they used to pride themselves on getting pronunciations right. But it's not just the BBC that's guilty of assuming Chinese is exotique like, you know, French - most Westerners in general seem to do that. Here's an amusing YouTube video making the point:
In a recent documentary series on Five, Mystery of the Mummies, in episode 2 China's Mystery Mummies (replayable online for a short while longer) the narrator pronounced "Loulan" with a nasal "a" and no "n" at the end, exactly as if it were French. It's actually "a" as in "ah", and you do pronounce the "n" at the end! (Not sure why Wikipedia have spelt it "Loulan", I believe it should be "Lulan" though my Chinese is pretty non-existent. But more existent than the BBC's or documentary makers', obviously).
To top it all, when reporting on the surprise at Wimbledon yesterday when Chinese player Zheng Jie knocked out world no. 1 Ana Ivanović, the BBC commentator actually pronounced her name using a French j at the start of both words! (Hellooo, "zh" isn't "j", that might be a bit of a clue that they're pronounced differently?).
Here's proof in the form of a short clip extracted from the video in the BBC news item (which I combined with a photo of Zheng Jie from Wikipedia just so I could upload the combo to YouTube, only for the purposes of reporting/commenting on it of course!):
The "Zh" should be like the "g" in "merger", the "eng" is neutral like "uhng". "Jie" is "jee-eh" - not "ie" as in "wiener", and it's an English j, there should be nary a French j anywhere in her name - see Wikipedia or this page on Chinese phonetics. (And no, the sounds in the credits are not the sound of me hitting the BBC with a tennis ball. However tempting that may be.)
Bah, why can't the BBC just get it right? I don't know why I find this sort of thing so annoying and irritating, but I do...
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