It's not just the Chinese

At one of my recording gigs this week, a character in a dialogue announced that he was going to have a humbugger for lunch.

Oh, it should be a word, it should!

It reminded me of a favourite happy accident of misspelling I encountered 20 years ago when I was a trainee teacher. I had asked a rambunctious class of 12-year-olds to write a science fiction story for me, and most of the boys had created post-Apocalypse scenarios in which they could run around playing at being a Mad Max-type vigilante. One of them broke into a gun shop to get 'tooled up'..... and came away toting a beersucker. Now that, I thought, would be a great word to describe me! I was a little disappointed when I eventually twigged that he had meant 'bazooka'.

A few years later, I had another class - 14-year-old boys, this time - writing an autobiographical piece about a time when they had experienced a strong emotion. This produced some lively writing from almost all of them, although it had a lot of shortcomings technically since this was the bottom ability stream and they all had fairly significant learning deficits.

One lad wrote about an incident the previous summer when there had been a fire aboard his parents' yacht. Unfortunately he wrote:

"The excitement was mounting, and so was my sister." (A brilliant syllepsis!)

I might have been able to restrain myself from falling off my chair with mirth if he hadn't followed up with this line:

"We couldn't bare any more!"

[I had a feeling I had told this story on here before, but couldn't find it when I searched the blog just now. Apologies if it is a repetition.]