"Funniest Misspellings Or Typos Seen On TMP?" Topic

Either in a news article, a post or a thread title.

Well, for me it's gotta be "NAVEL WARGAMING".

It always brings a smile when I think about it. I imagine young beautiful college girls, sitting on top of a wargaming table and . . . well, you know, . . . . . . pointing and making fun of our belly buttons, and then having a contest to see which of us has the ugliest one!

QUESTIONS:

What about you? What's the funniest typo or misspelling you've seen here on TMP? And what crazy image (if any) does it bring to mind?

Dan

Just yesterday there was somebody complaining about the lack of proofreading in a rulebook, and his complaint had about five spelling errors.

Not the funniest, but the most annoying: Calvary.

I saw an ironic response to a comment that "you can't fix stupid."

The response?

thats a dam fact

Solider for soldier, calvary as already mentioned.
Legionnaire for legionary really winds me up but that's not a spelling mistake. Text speak is the work of the devil.

The "lieb"regiment (which in German would be love regiment) is seen very often

The LOVE regiment!!! Man, that brings up all sorts of mental images. :)

Dan

I once tried to tell a guy on TMP that the German commander at Stalingrad was just "Paulus," and not "Von" Paulus.

In true TMP style, rather than admitting the error, he claimed that I was trying to deny his 1st Amendment freedoms, and that he had the Right to call him Von Paulus!

I'm with you on the "Von". Sure sign of someone who has not done even basic research.

Same with Volksstrum vs. Volksgrenadier.

I find most amusing the problem some folks have differentiating between Rogue Trader and Rouge Trader. Anyone with a smattering of French care to translate?

Blyue Fez…

Rouge for rogue is one.

Calvary for cavalry is another.

But the problem is that, it is not really a problem, because most people coming through the school system in my country, cannot spell, punctuate, or even cogitate!

Volksstrum

Speaking of spelling errors…

But the problem is that, it is not really a problem, because most people coming through the school system in my country, cannot spell, punctuate, or even cogitate!

Feeling your pain there, I was among a graduating class full of people who couldn't read past an elementary school level.

I ususally pass off speling erors as due to drink, fat fingers, artgritis or old age. Or any combination of the preceding.

However, apostrophe abuse is due to nothing more than satanic willful indifference. People who blithely tack on an apostrophe to make a plural probably poison puppie's also.

puppies did not need an apostrophe or was it deliberate ??

One of the funniest I've seen: moral rules. As in, "I failed my moral roll."

Almost as funny, when I see someone use the word "genera". I don't know if they really mean the word "genre" meaning type or class, or they really do mean "genera" meaning plural of genus.

Then there's one I frequently get mixed up, discreet and discrete.

Wolfprophet,

Got me.

Thanks,

Vince

My puppy's also has been on a course of antidotes, like Mithridates. It is now completely proof against poison's.

Abusing apostrophe's is much more phun than poi'soning puppy's.

And its not hard.

Just chain them together and imprison them in parenthise's

(''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''')

I have million's of them in my basement!

As a segue, does anyone else listen to books on tape? I find it very annoying when a professional reader mispronounces words. 'Limed' is perhaps the most common followed by 'flaccid'.

There are audio books about Gaesatae?!

There are audio books about Gaesatae?!

You are referring to 'limed'? For some reason it's become popular with British authors to describe an effect of light. When there is a strong, harsh light from just one direction the effect is to make a figure outlined in black and white. I'm not sure if the expression is from 'limelight' or from appearing to be coated in lime-wash but I'm certian it's not pronounced with a short 'i'.

Well I was just trying my best not to picture a scene where 'limed' and 'flaccid' would both be used ;-)

Could it be 'limned'?

limn [lɪm]
vb (tr)
1. (Fine Arts & Visual Arts / Art Terms) to represent in drawing or painting
2. Archaic to describe in words
3. (Fine Arts & Visual Arts / Art Terms) an obsolete word for illuminate
[from Old French enluminer to illumine (a manuscript) from Latin inlűminâre to brighten, from lűmen light]
limner [ˈlɪmnə] n

As a segue, does anyone else listen to books on tape? I find it very annoying when a professional reader mispronounces words. 'Limed' is perhaps the most common followed by 'flaccid'.

YES! I was recently listening to a bunch of the Halo series books and I guess no one can pronounce "Mjolnir" correctly. (They kept pronouncing it with a very hard J, making it sound like Mah-joel-neer instead of Mee-awl-neer) The authors who wrote the books also suffered very much from not knowing the difference between a magazine and a clip…constantly referring to "slamming home a fresh clip into the magazine catch." There were some other problems like that, both pronunciation and with the author's writing in the first place, but I can't recall the rest. Those ones just really really stood out. Aside from little stuff like that though, I'd still recommend The Flood for one. Maybe some others depending on my opinion of them when I finish.

Was also listening to a bunch of WH40K ones. As much as I really really like almost all the readers they get for the 40K audio dramas….a lot of them kept pronouncing "Cacophony" regularly became more like… "Karcophony." Aside from that, there wasn't really much.

One of the funniest I've seen: moral rules. As in, "I failed my moral roll."

I hear if you fail your moral roll you have to roll again to see which action you perform from the moral loss table.

1-2: Steal a muffin.
3-4: Kick a puppy.
5-6: Cheat on your Spouse/partner.

@A Special Loathing for Cherubs -- "In true TMP style, rather than admitting the error, he claimed that I was trying to deny his 1st Amendment freedoms, and that he had the Right to call him Von Paulus!"

Are you serious?! That's a fine example of willful ignorance at its very best.

Incidentally, the whole "its" vs. "it's" typo drives me insane.

Could it be 'limned'?

I don't see how. In one example the line was something like, "A flash of lightning limed the statue of an angel beside the open crypt".

Wasn't it the flaccid crypt?

T Meier – 'limned' is pronounced in the way you describe (short i), and the definition ('an obsolete word for illuminate') fits the meaning of your quoted sentence. I don't see how the word can't be 'limned.'

As for the original topic, this place is like Grand Central Station for the greengrocer's apostrophe.

George R R Martin is very fond of things being 'limned'.

…fits the meaning of your quoted sentence.

It is not 'illuminate' in the sense of light but strictly in the sense of decorate.

From the OED

Limn

To embellish letters, manuscripts or books.

To decorate with gold.

How does that fit with what a flash of lightening does to a statue?

Lime:

To coat as with lime-wash (whitewash).

Abbreviation of limelight.

Either fit much better. Obviously I do not have the text to say which the author intended but if he meant 'limn' he misused the word.

Listening to tapes recently I have some more to add to flaccid (FLAK-sid):

Inchoate (in-KOH-it) and impious (IM-pee-ous)

A favorite is slough because how it is pronounced changes it's meaning, this can sometimes be unintentionally humorous.

Comre friendly bombs and fall on Slough,
Cos it isn't up to snuff

T Meier – here's an apposite link:

link

The Sun goes out on a limn with unusual headline
Unusual word in front-page headline leaves some readers scratching their heads
September 07, 2010|By Jill Rosen, The Baltimore Sun

A four-letter word in a front-page headline Tuesday morning had some Baltimore Sun readers scrambling for their dictionaries.

The offending word was "limn" (pronounced like "limb"). It appeared over a story about the leading contenders vying to become Baltimore County's next executive. The headline read: "Opposing votes limn difference in race."

"I had to keep looking at it again and again," complained Carol N. Shaw, one of a number of readers who contacted The Sun yesterday. "I consider myself an educated person. I graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Maryland, College Park some years ago with a degree in international relations/economics. I have never heard of the word "limn." … To put a word like "limn" in the headline for the lead article on the front page of this newspaper seems to me to be unbelievably arrogant and patronizing."

The dictionary explains that the verb means to represent in drawing or painting, or, more simply, to describe. It derives from the Latin "illuminare," to embellish or light up. "Illuminate" comes from the same root.

"It did not, however, immediately illuminate some readers, who resorted to dictionaries," said John E. McIntyre, The Sun's night content production manager and longtime grammar guru. "It is most commonly found in writing about art, so it may not have been the shrewdest choice for the front page, rather than an arts page."

This is not the first time the word has appeared in The Sun. In fact, the paper has included the word at least 47 times, just since 1991. It has turned up twice before in headlines, in 1993 and 2000.

McIntyre said he supports challenging readers — now and again.

"Speaking as a headline writer myself, though not the author of this one, I heartily endorse all sorts of short verbs that are neither scatological nor obscene," he said. "Speaking as a language maven, I applaud when people consult dictionaries to add another little brick to the wall of their vocabularies. Now that you know what it means, it is yours forever."

…here's an apposite link.

I was familiar with the word already from reading about art and old books. The confusion comes from use of 'illuminate' in the definition. Modern people tend to take this literally but it is used in this case allegorically or tangentially. 'Limn' does not mean to increase the the actual luminosity or even the clarity of perception. It means to decorate in an elaborate or gaudy way. In the headline in question the writer obviously thinks it means to, 'pick out' or make clear but anyone who has looked at an illuminated manuscript knows this is a poor metaphorical connection. Limned texts are not easier to read, if anything they confuse the eye.

Hah!

So my Christmas tree gets limned?

So my Christmas tree gets limned?

It would be a bit redundant to say a Christmas tree was limned, unless it was by way of specifying how or with what, since by definition a Christmas tree is gaudily decorated. It's important to note also 'limn' is used of things other than books by extension or analogy. Like saying an actual sunset was 'painted'.

Limn isn't only used to refer to illumination of manuscripts:

From Webster's:
link

limn
verb \ˈlim\
limnedlimn·ing
Definition of LIMN
transitive verb
1
: to draw or paint on a surface
2
: to outline in clear sharp detail : delineate
3
: describe <the novel limns the frontier life of the settlers>
— limn·er noun
Examples of LIMN

<he limned the scene in the courtroom so perfectly I could practically see it>

Presumably its use in the second and third forms, is catachrectic, but widely accepted. Here it is in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 to describe someone being lit up, or backlit, by a televison screen, a catachrectic use of meaning two (to outline):

Then, if he wished, Montag might rise, walk to the window, keep one eye on the TV screen, open the window, lean out, look back, and see himself dramatized, described, made over, standing there, limned in the bright small television screen from outside, a drama to be watched objectively, knowing that in other parlors he was large as life, in full color, dimensionally perfect! and if he kept his eye peeled quickly he would see himself, an instant before oblivion, being punctured for the benefit of how many civilian parlor-sitters who had been wakened from sleep a few minutes ago by the frantic sirening of their living room walls to come watch the big game, the hunt, the one-man carnival.

If you're just unhappy that the usage of the word has expanded to the metaphorical from the Middle English, that's a different argument than what word the authors whose books you're listening to used. In that, we have two hypotheses:
1) they're using 'limned' in a common way and the audiobook readers are pronouncing it correctly, or
2) they're using 'limed' in an uncommon, if not rare, way, and the readers are pronouncing it wrong.

Occam's razor points me towards #1. I guess it would be simpler to resolve if we knew what books you heard it in and then someone searched them on Amazon to see which it was. But this is more fun (I hope, as it's all well-intentioned from my end)!

I don't know bout you people over there cross the big water, but today's young'ns over here are not taught spelling anymore. All these high tech gizmos with spell checks galore. All they do is put some words down, hit the spell check button, then hand it in.

So, when reading time comes, they don't pay attention to the spelling.

Sad. Tragic.

"Matt" finish instead of Matte finish.

From Webster's:

Websters is a dictionary of authority; that is to say the editors decide what words mean and they tell you. Anyone could write a dictionary and do the same. I have never had much respect for dictionaries of that type.

The OED by contrast is a dictionary which does not define words so much as present them by quotation. It gives you the first appearance of the word in English and an example following each slight shift of the word's meaning over time.

Now my copy of the OED is twenty years old and perhaps this word is now so often used in this new sense, that of making shiny or picking out with light, nowadays that this has indeed become a new meaning. As Douglas Adams points out changes which come along after you are a certian age are apt to seem against the natural order of things.

they're using 'limned' in a common way

But 'limn' is not a common word. In fact it is specifically noted to be an antique word seldom used, a notation which does not follow either of the meanings of 'lime' which could just as well be applied. As I said I was familiar with the word when I heard the audiotape and I didn't even consider that explanation because it seemed so unlikely. The OED gives the last quotation, the last change of meaning as 1845 and that is a wide gap (this was a shift in meaning from traditional book illumination to the use of watercolors), the last before that is in the 1600's.

I can see the application in Bradbury better because a television is like a book, a person depicted on it like an illumination on a page, particularly in the context of a novel about television destroying literacy – which is what he said it was about however much critics may disagree.