Howler (error)
Encyclopedia
Howler, in the main sense this article deals with, is a glaring blunder
, typically an amusing one.
The word howler is variously used. Some usages are seen as correct English, others as slang (see Howler
for disambiguation). This article deals with the slang term in a sense that does not appear explicitly in the third edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
(reprinted as corrected by Charles Talbut Onions
1967). It does however appear in more recent dictionaries; also, in Eric Partridge
's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English in the 1951 revision, it is defined in part as: "... A glaring (and amusing) blunder: from before 1890; ... also, a tremendous lie ... Literally something that howls or cries for notice, or perhaps ... by way of contracting howling blunder."
Another common interpretation of this usage is that a howler is a mistake fit to make one howl with laughter, and that is the main theme of this article.
The sense of howling blunder seems to have survived better than most, and that is the theme of the rest of this article.
and Canadian
slang term boner. Like howler, boner can be used in any sense to mean an ignominious and usually laughable blunder, and also like howler, it has been used in the titles of published collections of largely schoolboy blunders since at least the 1930s.
Boner means much the same as howler in the context of this article, but its other meanings differ. For one thing, boner is not traditionally used as a general intensifier or for specifically describing an accident or the like, as howler and howling are. Assorted other terms have much longer histories and some of them are not regarded as slang. For example Bull
and Blunder have long been used in similar senses, each with its own overtones and assorted extraneous meanings. Bulls and Blunders, an American book published in the 1890s, uses the word howler only once, in the passage: "Miss A. C. Graham, of Annerley, has received a prize from the University Correspondent for the best collection of schoolboy howlers". Although he did not otherwise use the word himself, the author apparently saw no need to define the term, so it must have been fairly familiar on both sides of the Atlantic even at that time, although perhaps not as well established a usage as now.
, in which an error is wilfully concealed, whether for didactic purposes or for entertainment. In one sense the converse of either a howler or a sophism is a mathematical paradox
, in which a valid derivation leads to an unexpected or implausible result. However, in the terminology of Willard V. O. Quine, that would be a veridical paradox
, whereas sophisms and fallacies would be falsidical paradoxes
.
, a malapropism
, or simply a spectacular, usually compact, demonstration of misunderstanding, illogic, or outright ignorance. As such, a howler could be an intellectual blunder in any field of knowledge, usually on a point that should have been obvious in context. In the short story by Eden Philpotts Doctor Dunston's Howler, the "howler" in question was not even verbal; it was flogging the wrong boy, with disastrous consequences.
Conversely, on inspection of many examples of bulls and howlers, it appears that often they simply are the products of unfortunate wording, punctuation, or point of view. Schoolboy howlers in particular sometimes amount to what Richard Feynman
called Perfectly reasonable deviations from the beaten track. Such specimens may variously be based on mondegreen
s, or they might be derived from misunderstandings of fact by the elders, teachers or communities. Not all howlers originate with the pupil.
A no doubt fictitious, but illustrative, example appears in Poaching in Excelsis, apparently written in part at least by G. K. Menzies (B. 1869). It expresses a Scottish poacher's stupefied reaction to a newspaper report that 'Two men were fined £120 apiece for poaching a white rhinoceros.' . That Scot was patently skilled in his own field, and interpreted the report in a perspective that was bounded by his experience of having struggled to carry off a poached stag, hence the howler; it had little to do with his own intelligence or competence as a poacher in Scotland. He simply had no idea that poaching rhinos in Africa differed qualitatively as well as quantitatively from poaching small game in Scotland.
The howlers of prominent or self-important people lend themselves to parody and satire, so much so that Quaylisms, Bushism
s, Goldwynisms, and Yogiisms
were coined in far greater numbers than ever the alleged sources could have produced. Sometimes such lampoon
ing is fairly good-humoured, sometimes it is deliberately used as a political weapon. In either case it generally is easier to propagate a spuriously attributed howler than to retract one.
s from a comfortable position of superiority. This applies especially strongly when the object of the condescension and mockery is a member of some other social class or group. National, regional, racial, or political rivals, or occupational groups such as lawyers, doctors, police, and armed forces, all are stock targets of assorted jokes; their howlers, fictional or otherwise, are common themes. Older collections of cartoons and jokes, published before the modern sensitivity to political correctness
, are rich sources of examples.
Sometimes, especially in oppressed peoples, such wit takes on an ironic turn and the butt of the stories then becomes one's own people. Very likely such mock self-mockery gave rise to the term Irish bull
(as opposed to just any bull) and to works such as Samuel Lover
's novel Handy Andy.
Similarly the Yiddish stories of the "wise men" of the town of Chelm caould be argued to be as rich in self-mockery as in mockery. There are many other examples of mixed mockery and self-mockery, good-natured or otherwise.
Professor Walter William Skeat
coined the term ghost-word
in the late nineteenth century. By that he meant the creation of fictitious, originally meaningless, words by such influences as printers' errors and illegible copy. So for example, "ciffy" instead of "cliffy" and "morse" instead of "nurse" are just two examples that propagated considerably in printed material, so much so that they occasionally are to be found in print or in usage today, more than a century later, sometimes in old books still in use, sometimes in modern publications relying on such books.
Apart from the problems of revealing the original errors once they have been accepted, there is the problem of dealing with the supporting rationalisations that arise in the course of time. See for example the article on Riding (country subdivision), paying particular attention to the reference to farthing and the sections on Word history and Norse states. In the context of such documented material the false etymology
of "Riding" is particularly illustrative: "A common misconception holds that the term arose from some association between the size of the district and the distance that can be covered on horseback in a certain amount of time".
As a notorious example of how such errors can become officially established, consider the extant and established name of Nome
, Alaska
. Allegedly it originated when a British cartographer copied an ambiguous annotation made by a British officer on a nautical chart. The officer had written "? Name" next to the unnamed cape. The mapmaker misread the annotation as "C. Nome", meaning Cape Nome. If that story is true, then the name is a material example of a ghost word.
Nome certainly is an example of how such assertions often are disputed; an alternative story connects the source with the place name: Nomedalen in Norway
.
, when the intended meaning is adventitious, arbitrary, accidental
, or something similarly uncertain
or nondeterministic
. Another is infinite
for "very large". Some terms have been subject to such routine abuse that they lose their proper meanings, reducing the expressive power of the language. Imply, infer, unique, absolute and many others have become difficult to use in any precise sense without risk of misunderstanding. Such howlers are a pernicious, but probably unavoidable, aspect of the continuous change of language that renders most modern readers unable to make sense of even early modern books such as the First Folio
of Shakespeare or the original editions of the Authorized King James Version of the bible.
The popularity of nautical themes in literature has tempted many authors ignorant of the technicalities, into embarrassing howlers in their terminology. A popular example is in the opening line of the song Tom Bowling by Charles Dibdin
. It refers metaphorically to a human corpse as a "sheer hulk"
. The intent is something like "complete wreck", which is quite inappropriate to the real meaning of the term. In literature, blunders of that type have been so common for so long that they have been satirised in works such as the short story by Doyle
: Cyprian Overbeck Wells, in which he mocks the nautical blunders in the terminology Jonathan Swift
used in Gulliver's Travels
.
relates the following experience, upsetting, but certainly not unigue: ...The headline above one of the stories on my page read: "Work Comes Second For Tony And I". In case you did not know, newspaper headlines are written not by the contributors but by sub-editors ...
I was shocked. That a sub on the Times should commit such a howler was beyond belief.
That sub's blunder was a classic example of a journalistic howler.
Charles Babbage
presented a very characteristic reaction of the intellectual to the howler when he wrote: 'On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.' Although one could see this as a politicians' howler, it is too common a form for that. However badly the question nonplussed Babbage, something of the kind emerges whenever a layman so radically fails to understand the logical structure of a system, that he cannot begin to perceive the matching logic of the problems that it is suited to deal with.
Probably the most prominent anthologisers
of howlers in the United Kingdom
were Cecil Hunt
and Russell Ash
. In the United States
, probably the most prominent was Alexander Abingdon. According to Abingdon's foreword to Bigger and Better Boners, he shared material with Hunt at least. However, since their day many more collections have appeared, commonly relying heavily on plagiarism
of the earlier anthologies.
Here are a few short, illustrative examples of mainly schoolboy howlers culled from various collections:
Examples of retention of misinformation, or where information is presented in an unfamiliar context:
Unfamiliar instruction heard without comprehension frequently leads to mondegreen
s and malapropism
s:
Bull: a confusion of wording often related vaguely to a valid idea; not all howlers are bulls in this sense, but the following are:
In extreme examples of bulls it is hard to guess exactly what the pupil had in mind, or how to correct it. Perhaps the following one stems from some idea that Shakespeare’s works were written by someone else. Whatever its origin, it is a prime example of how a howler, and in particular the paradox
ical aspects of a bull, presumably inadvertently, may constitute deeper comment on the human condition
than most deliberate epigrams:
Sometimes the pupil simply may have been groping for any answer that might placate the examiner.
Some howlers are disconcertingly thought-provoking or look suspiciously like cynicism.
As already remarked, not all howlers are verbal:
Blunder
A blunder is a particularly bad mistake. Specific instances include:* Blunder , a very poor move in chess* Hopetoun Blunder, an event in Australian history.* Brand blunder, in marketing.* Draft blunder, in American sports....
, typically an amusing one.
The word howler is variously used. Some usages are seen as correct English, others as slang (see Howler
Howler
Howler may refer to:*Howler , a band from Minneapolis, Minnesota*The Howler, a roller coaster at Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana*Howler , a fictional alien species from the Animorphs setting...
for disambiguation). This article deals with the slang term in a sense that does not appear explicitly in the third edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, often abbreviated to SOED, is a scaled-down version of the Oxford English Dictionary . It comprises two volumes rather than the twenty needed for the full second edition of the OED...
(reprinted as corrected by Charles Talbut Onions
Charles Talbut Onions
Charles Talbut Onions was an English grammarian and lexicographer and the fourth editor of the Oxford English Dictionary....
1967). It does however appear in more recent dictionaries; also, in Eric Partridge
Eric Partridge
Eric Honeywood Partridge was a New Zealand/British lexicographer of the English language, particularly of its slang. His writing career was interrupted only by his service in the Army Education Corps and the RAF correspondence department during World War II...
's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English in the 1951 revision, it is defined in part as: "... A glaring (and amusing) blunder: from before 1890; ... also, a tremendous lie ... Literally something that howls or cries for notice, or perhaps ... by way of contracting howling blunder."
Another common interpretation of this usage is that a howler is a mistake fit to make one howl with laughter, and that is the main theme of this article.
Derivations and other usages of Howler and Howling
There are various colloquial usages of howler, such as the following, largely obsolete, examples, derivatives of the intensifier "howling", as in howling wilderness, (Deuteronomy 32:10) They are most often to be encountered in books of the late 19th to early 20th century:- A bitterly cold day
- A heavy fall, literally or figuratively
- A serious accident (especially to come a howler or go a howler, eg "Our hansom came a howler"; compare: come a cropper)
- A tremendous lie
- Something that howls or cries out for notice ("a howling blunder"?)
- A fashionably but extravagantly overdressed man, a "howling swell"
- A person hired to howl at a funeral
The sense of howling blunder seems to have survived better than most, and that is the theme of the rest of this article.
Equivalent terms
All over the world, probably in all natural languages, there are many informal terms for blunders, but in English the nearest rival for howler in the sense dealt with in this article, is the mainly United StatesUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
slang term boner. Like howler, boner can be used in any sense to mean an ignominious and usually laughable blunder, and also like howler, it has been used in the titles of published collections of largely schoolboy blunders since at least the 1930s.
Boner means much the same as howler in the context of this article, but its other meanings differ. For one thing, boner is not traditionally used as a general intensifier or for specifically describing an accident or the like, as howler and howling are. Assorted other terms have much longer histories and some of them are not regarded as slang. For example Bull
Irish bull
An Irish bull is a ludicrous, incongruent or logically absurd statement, generally unrecognized as such by its author.The addition of the epithet Irish is a late addition....
and Blunder have long been used in similar senses, each with its own overtones and assorted extraneous meanings. Bulls and Blunders, an American book published in the 1890s, uses the word howler only once, in the passage: "Miss A. C. Graham, of Annerley, has received a prize from the University Correspondent for the best collection of schoolboy howlers". Although he did not otherwise use the word himself, the author apparently saw no need to define the term, so it must have been fairly familiar on both sides of the Atlantic even at that time, although perhaps not as well established a usage as now.
Mathematics as a special case of terminology
Mathematicians sometimes speak of howlers, mainly in the form of an error which leads innocently, but inappropriately, to a correct result. However, the distinction between mathematical howlers and mathematical fallacies is poorly defined and the terminology is confused and arbitrary; hardly any uniform definition is universally accepted for any term. Terms related to howlers and fallacies include sophismSophism
Sophism in the modern definition is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. In ancient Greece, sophists were a category of teachers who specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric for the purpose of teaching aretê — excellence, or virtue — predominantly to young statesmen and...
, in which an error is wilfully concealed, whether for didactic purposes or for entertainment. In one sense the converse of either a howler or a sophism is a mathematical paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
, in which a valid derivation leads to an unexpected or implausible result. However, in the terminology of Willard V. O. Quine, that would be a veridical paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
, whereas sophisms and fallacies would be falsidical paradoxes
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
.
Forms of howlers
Typically such definitions of the term howler or boner do not specify the mode of the error; a howler could be a solecismSolecism
In traditional prescriptive grammar, a solecism is something perceived as a grammatical mistake or absurdity, or even a simply non-standard usage. The word was originally used by the Greeks for what they perceived as mistakes in their language...
, a malapropism
Malapropism
A malapropism is an act of misusing or the habitual misuse of similar sounding words, especially with humorous results. An example is Yogi Berra's statement: "Texas has a lot of electrical votes," rather than "electoral votes".-Etymology:...
, or simply a spectacular, usually compact, demonstration of misunderstanding, illogic, or outright ignorance. As such, a howler could be an intellectual blunder in any field of knowledge, usually on a point that should have been obvious in context. In the short story by Eden Philpotts Doctor Dunston's Howler, the "howler" in question was not even verbal; it was flogging the wrong boy, with disastrous consequences.
Conversely, on inspection of many examples of bulls and howlers, it appears that often they simply are the products of unfortunate wording, punctuation, or point of view. Schoolboy howlers in particular sometimes amount to what Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics...
called Perfectly reasonable deviations from the beaten track. Such specimens may variously be based on mondegreen
Mondegreen
A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. It most commonly is applied to a line in a poem or a lyric in a song...
s, or they might be derived from misunderstandings of fact by the elders, teachers or communities. Not all howlers originate with the pupil.
A no doubt fictitious, but illustrative, example appears in Poaching in Excelsis, apparently written in part at least by G. K. Menzies (B. 1869). It expresses a Scottish poacher's stupefied reaction to a newspaper report that 'Two men were fined £120 apiece for poaching a white rhinoceros.' . That Scot was patently skilled in his own field, and interpreted the report in a perspective that was bounded by his experience of having struggled to carry off a poached stag, hence the howler; it had little to do with his own intelligence or competence as a poacher in Scotland. He simply had no idea that poaching rhinos in Africa differed qualitatively as well as quantitatively from poaching small game in Scotland.
Fields in which howlers propagate
Terms such as howler do not specify the discipline in which the blunder was perpetrated. Howlers have little special application to any particular field, except perhaps education. Most collections refer mainly to the schoolboy howler, politician's howler, epitaph howler, judicial howler, and so on, not always using the term howler, boner or the like. There are various classes in mood as well; the typical schoolboy howler displays innocent ignorance or misunderstanding, whereas the typical politician's howler is likely to expose smugly ignorant pretentiousness, bigotry, or self-interest.The howlers of prominent or self-important people lend themselves to parody and satire, so much so that Quaylisms, Bushism
Bushism
Bushisms are unconventional words, phrases, pronunciations, malapropisms, and semantic or linguistic errors that have occurred in the public speaking of former President of the United States George W. Bush and, much less notably, of his father, George H. W. Bush. The term has become part of popular...
s, Goldwynisms, and Yogiisms
Yogi Berra
Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra is a former American Major League Baseball catcher, outfielder, and manager. He played almost his entire 19-year baseball career for the New York Yankees...
were coined in far greater numbers than ever the alleged sources could have produced. Sometimes such lampoon
Lampoon
Lampoon may refer to one of the following:*Parody*The Thai actor and singer Amphol Lampoon*Harvard Lampoon, a noted humor magazine**National Lampoon , a defunct offshoot of Harvard Lampoon***National Lampoon, Inc., a 2002 company...
ing is fairly good-humoured, sometimes it is deliberately used as a political weapon. In either case it generally is easier to propagate a spuriously attributed howler than to retract one.
The popularity of howlers
Collections of howlers, boners, bulls and the like are popular sellers as joke books go, and they tend to be popular as reprints, as Abingdon, for example, remarks in his preface. One contributory reason among many might well be a strong tendency for people to enjoy laughing at the blunders of stereotypeStereotype
A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of "stereotype" and "prejudice" are often confused with many other different meanings...
s from a comfortable position of superiority. This applies especially strongly when the object of the condescension and mockery is a member of some other social class or group. National, regional, racial, or political rivals, or occupational groups such as lawyers, doctors, police, and armed forces, all are stock targets of assorted jokes; their howlers, fictional or otherwise, are common themes. Older collections of cartoons and jokes, published before the modern sensitivity to political correctness
Political correctness
Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...
, are rich sources of examples.
Sometimes, especially in oppressed peoples, such wit takes on an ironic turn and the butt of the stories then becomes one's own people. Very likely such mock self-mockery gave rise to the term Irish bull
Irish bull
An Irish bull is a ludicrous, incongruent or logically absurd statement, generally unrecognized as such by its author.The addition of the epithet Irish is a late addition....
(as opposed to just any bull) and to works such as Samuel Lover
Samuel Lover
Samuel Lover was an Anglo-Irish songwriter, novelist, as well as a painter of portraits, chiefly miniatures. He was the grandfather of Victor Herbert....
's novel Handy Andy.
Similarly the Yiddish stories of the "wise men" of the town of Chelm caould be argued to be as rich in self-mockery as in mockery. There are many other examples of mixed mockery and self-mockery, good-natured or otherwise.
Howler propagation and afterlife — Ghost words
Howlers "in the wild" include many misuses of technical terms or principles that are too obscure or too unfunny for anyone to publish them. Such examples accordingly remain obscure, but a few have reappeared subsequently as good faith entries in dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and related authoritative documents. In the nature of things, encyclopaedic and lexicographic sources rely heavily on each other, and such words have a tendency to propagate from one textbook to another. It can be very difficult to eradicate unnoticed errors that have achieved publication in standard reference books.Professor Walter William Skeat
Walter William Skeat
Walter William Skeat , English philologist, was born in London on the 21st of November 1835, and educated at King's College School , Highgate School, and Christ's College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in July 1860. His grandsons include the noted palaeographer T. C...
coined the term ghost-word
Ghost word
A ghost word is a meaningless word that came into existence or acceptance, not by being derived through long-standing usage, nor by being coined at need, but only as the result of an error. In the best-known examples such an error will have caused the word to be published in a dictionary or...
in the late nineteenth century. By that he meant the creation of fictitious, originally meaningless, words by such influences as printers' errors and illegible copy. So for example, "ciffy" instead of "cliffy" and "morse" instead of "nurse" are just two examples that propagated considerably in printed material, so much so that they occasionally are to be found in print or in usage today, more than a century later, sometimes in old books still in use, sometimes in modern publications relying on such books.
Apart from the problems of revealing the original errors once they have been accepted, there is the problem of dealing with the supporting rationalisations that arise in the course of time. See for example the article on Riding (country subdivision), paying particular attention to the reference to farthing and the sections on Word history and Norse states. In the context of such documented material the false etymology
False etymology
Folk etymology is change in a word or phrase over time resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one. Unanalyzable borrowings from foreign languages, like asparagus, or old compounds such as samblind which have lost their iconic motivation are...
of "Riding" is particularly illustrative: "A common misconception holds that the term arose from some association between the size of the district and the distance that can be covered on horseback in a certain amount of time".
As a notorious example of how such errors can become officially established, consider the extant and established name of Nome
Nome, Alaska
Nome is a city in the Nome Census Area in the Unorganized Borough of the U.S. state of Alaska, located on the southern Seward Peninsula coast on Norton Sound of the Bering Sea. According to the 2010 Census, the city population was 3,598. Nome was incorporated on April 9, 1901, and was once the...
, Alaska
Alaska
Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...
. Allegedly it originated when a British cartographer copied an ambiguous annotation made by a British officer on a nautical chart. The officer had written "? Name" next to the unnamed cape. The mapmaker misread the annotation as "C. Nome", meaning Cape Nome. If that story is true, then the name is a material example of a ghost word.
Nome certainly is an example of how such assertions often are disputed; an alternative story connects the source with the place name: Nomedalen in Norway
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
.
Technical terms and technical incompetence
Misuse of technical terms as howlers is so common that it rarely is recognised except by people skilled in the relevant fields. One case in point is the use of "random"Randomness
Randomness has somewhat differing meanings as used in various fields. It also has common meanings which are connected to the notion of predictability of events....
, when the intended meaning is adventitious, arbitrary, accidental
Accidental
Accidental may mean:* Accidental * Accidental , by Fred Frith* Accidental , a biological phenomenon more commonly known as vagrancy* Accidental property, a philosophical term-See also:* Accident...
, or something similarly uncertain
Uncertainty
Uncertainty is a term used in subtly different ways in a number of fields, including physics, philosophy, statistics, economics, finance, insurance, psychology, sociology, engineering, and information science...
or nondeterministic
Indeterminacy (Philosophy)
Indeterminacy, in philosophy, can refer both to common scientific and mathematical concepts of uncertainty and their implications and to another kind of indeterminacy deriving from the nature of definition or meaning...
. Another is infinite
Infinity
Infinity is a concept in many fields, most predominantly mathematics and physics, that refers to a quantity without bound or end. People have developed various ideas throughout history about the nature of infinity...
for "very large". Some terms have been subject to such routine abuse that they lose their proper meanings, reducing the expressive power of the language. Imply, infer, unique, absolute and many others have become difficult to use in any precise sense without risk of misunderstanding. Such howlers are a pernicious, but probably unavoidable, aspect of the continuous change of language that renders most modern readers unable to make sense of even early modern books such as the First Folio
First Folio
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. is the 1623 published collection of William Shakespeare's plays. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the First Folio....
of Shakespeare or the original editions of the Authorized King James Version of the bible.
The popularity of nautical themes in literature has tempted many authors ignorant of the technicalities, into embarrassing howlers in their terminology. A popular example is in the opening line of the song Tom Bowling by Charles Dibdin
Charles Dibdin
Charles Dibdin was a British musician, dramatist, novelist, actor and songwriter. The son of a parish clerk, he was born in Southampton on or before 4 March 1745, and was the youngest of a family of 18....
. It refers metaphorically to a human corpse as a "sheer hulk"
Hulk (ship)
A hulk is a ship that is afloat, but incapable of going to sea. Although sometimes used to describe a ship that has been launched but not completed, the term most often refers to an old ship that has had its rigging or internal equipment removed, retaining only its flotational qualities...
. The intent is something like "complete wreck", which is quite inappropriate to the real meaning of the term. In literature, blunders of that type have been so common for so long that they have been satirised in works such as the short story by Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...
: Cyprian Overbeck Wells, in which he mocks the nautical blunders in the terminology Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
used in Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver's Travels
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels , is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of...
.
Sources and authenticity
In contrast to tales representing people's rivals as stupid or undignified, it is easy to believe that most schoolboy howlers are genuine, or at least are based on genuine incidents; any school teacher interested in the matter can collect authentic samples routinely. However, it is beyond doubt that the collections formally published or otherwise in circulation contain spurious examples, or at least a high degree of creative editing, as is variously remarked upon in the introductory text of the more thoughtful anthologies. It most certainly is not as a rule possible to establish anything like definitive, "pedantically correct" versions with "authentic wording", even if there were much point to any such ideal.Examples and Collections of allegedly genuine howlers
John HumphrysJohn Humphrys
Desmond John Humphrys , is a Welsh-born British author, journalist and presenter of radio and television, who has won many national broadcasting awards...
relates the following experience, upsetting, but certainly not unigue: ...The headline above one of the stories on my page read: "Work Comes Second For Tony And I". In case you did not know, newspaper headlines are written not by the contributors but by sub-editors ...
I was shocked. That a sub on the Times should commit such a howler was beyond belief.
That sub's blunder was a classic example of a journalistic howler.
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage, FRS was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer...
presented a very characteristic reaction of the intellectual to the howler when he wrote: 'On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.' Although one could see this as a politicians' howler, it is too common a form for that. However badly the question nonplussed Babbage, something of the kind emerges whenever a layman so radically fails to understand the logical structure of a system, that he cannot begin to perceive the matching logic of the problems that it is suited to deal with.
Probably the most prominent anthologisers
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
of howlers in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
were Cecil Hunt
Cecil Hunt (writer)
Horace Cecil Hunt, born London, 13 September 1902, died London, 13 July 1954, age 51 years, was a prolific journalist, editor, novelist and anthologist, who is best known for his collections of unintended errors made by British schoolchildren in their examinations and written work, commonly known...
and Russell Ash
Russell Ash
Russell Ash was the British author of the Top 10 of Everything series of books, as well as Great Wonders of the World, Incredible Comparisons and many other reference, art and humour titles, most notably his recent series of books on strange-but-true names, Potty, Fartwell & Knob, Busty, Slag and...
. In the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, probably the most prominent was Alexander Abingdon. According to Abingdon's foreword to Bigger and Better Boners, he shared material with Hunt at least. However, since their day many more collections have appeared, commonly relying heavily on plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
of the earlier anthologies.
Here are a few short, illustrative examples of mainly schoolboy howlers culled from various collections:
Examples of retention of misinformation, or where information is presented in an unfamiliar context:
- * A Cattle is a shaggy kind of cow. (Perhaps a city child had been shown a picture of highland cattle before he knew the word “cattle”. If so, the error was natural.)
- * Africa is much hotter than some countries because it is abroad. (To a British child growing up in a cold temperate zone, a natural idea.)
- * Poetry is when every line starts with a capital letter. (Even many adults struggle to distinguish poetry from prose after first encountering blank verse.)
- * The locusts were the chief plague, they ate the first-born.
- * All creatures are imperfect beasts. Man alone is a perfect beast.
Unfamiliar instruction heard without comprehension frequently leads to mondegreen
Mondegreen
A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. It most commonly is applied to a line in a poem or a lyric in a song...
s and malapropism
Malapropism
A malapropism is an act of misusing or the habitual misuse of similar sounding words, especially with humorous results. An example is Yogi Berra's statement: "Texas has a lot of electrical votes," rather than "electoral votes".-Etymology:...
s:
- * Hiatus is breath that wants seeing to.
- * A gherkin is a native who runs after people with a knife.
- * "Cum grano salis" means: "Although with a corn, thou dancest."
- * "Mon frère ainé" means: "My ass of a brother".
Bull: a confusion of wording often related vaguely to a valid idea; not all howlers are bulls in this sense, but the following are:
- * The Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offence.
- * Edward III would have been King of France if his mother had been a man.
- * To be a good nurse you must be absolutely sterile.
- * Tundras are the treeless forests of South America.
In extreme examples of bulls it is hard to guess exactly what the pupil had in mind, or how to correct it. Perhaps the following one stems from some idea that Shakespeare’s works were written by someone else. Whatever its origin, it is a prime example of how a howler, and in particular the paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
ical aspects of a bull, presumably inadvertently, may constitute deeper comment on the human condition
Human condition
The human condition encompasses the experiences of being human in a social, cultural, and personal context. It can be described as the irreducible part of humanity that is inherent and not connected to gender, race, class, etc. — a search for purpose, sense of curiosity, the inevitability of...
than most deliberate epigrams:
- * Homer was not written by Homer, but another man of that name.
Sometimes the pupil simply may have been groping for any answer that might placate the examiner.
- * The plural of ox is oxygen.
- * The Israelites made a golden calf because they didn't have enough gold to make a cow.
- * SOS is a musical term. It means Same Only Softer.
- * There are four symptoms for a cold. Two I forget and the other two are too well known to mention.
Some howlers are disconcertingly thought-provoking or look suspiciously like cynicism.
- * Dictionaries are books written by people who think they can spell better than anyone else.
- * "Etc" is a sign used to make believe that you know more than you do.
- * The difference between air and water is that air can be made wetter, but not water.
- * What is half of five? It depends on whether you mean the two or the three.
As already remarked, not all howlers are verbal:
- * One youngster copied down a subtraction sum wrongly, with the smaller number above. As it happened, the date was just above his sum, so he borrowed from his date.