A good example of the effect of misplacing a comma is to be found in the ancient oracle — ‘Thou shalt go thou shalt return never by war shalt thou perish.’ By one way of placing the commas, the consulter of the oracle was forbidden to go upon the purposed expedition; by reading it his own way, he went and perished.

— W.T. Dobson, “Literaria,” Dublin University Magazine, August 1873

diallelous
adj. involving circular reasoning

On my challenging an ingenious friend to define time and space, he answered, ‘Time is the condition of two things existing in the same space. Space is the condition of two things existing in the same time.’ This is clever, pointed, and true, but, as may easily be seen, diallelous.

— Francis Garden, A Dictionary of English Philosophical Terms, 1878

Captured by the North Vietnamese in 1965, Navy pilot Jeremiah Denton was forced to participate in a propaganda interview to be broadcast in the United States. Pretending to be oppressed by the television lights, he blinked the word “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse code — alerting U.S. Naval Intelligence for the first time that American prisoners were being tortured.

In his Investigator’s Guide to Steganography (2003), Gregory Kipper notes that captured soldiers would sometimes use hand signals to transmit messages during photo ops; “often, these gestures were airbrushed out by the media.”

The members of the Flemish Academy, of Anvers, recently determined to frame a word which would be readily intelligible to all who understand the language of Flanders and who had ever seen a horseless carriage, and the result was that after much deep thought they framed the following word: Snelpaardelooszonderspoorwegpetrolrijtuig. This euphonious word signifies ‘a carriage which is worked by means of petroleum, which travels fast, which has no horses and which is not run on rails.’ This is, from one point of view, a fine example of multum in parvo, but it may be questioned whether one extraordinarily long word is preferable to half a dozen short words.

— Georgetown [Colo.] Herald, May 19, 1899

From 1995 to 1998, the journal Philosophy and Literature ran a bad writing contest to mark “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles.” The final year’s winners:

First prize:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

— Judith Butler, “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” in the journal Diacritics

Second prize:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalise’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

— Homi K. Bhabha in his book The Location of Culture

Third prize:

As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet’s work of ‘les noms du père’, a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus (‘Les Non-dupes errent’), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomenologically irreducible dyad of the mother and child.

— Steven Z. Levine in Bradford Collins, ed., Twelve Views of Manet’s Bar

The contest’s only condition was that entries not be ironic: “Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread.” The full list of winners is here.