A story has been told of a graceless scamp who gained access to the Clarendon printing-office in Oxford, when the forms of a new edition of the Episcopal prayer book had just been made up and were ready for the press. In that part of the ‘form’ containing the marriage service, he substituted the letter k for the letter v in the word live, and thus the vow to ‘love, honor, comfort,’ etc., ‘so long as ye both shall live,’ was made to read, ‘so long as ye both shall like.’ The change was not discovered until the whole of the edition was printed off.

— Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, October 1870

When Teddy Roosevelt was sworn in in 1901, the New York Times printed a B in place of an O in one story and recorded that “surrounded only by a few friends, Theodore Roosevelt took his simple bath to defend and carry out our Constitution.”

“The most amusing feature of the above,” reported the Bookman, “is due to an English newspaper which quoted the paragraph, did not recognise the misprint and went on to comment upon it with perfect seriousness.”

In 1867, the finance department of the city of Madrid employed a man named Don Juan Nepomuceno de Burionagonatotorecagageazcoecha.

If he had moved to northern Bohemia and become “deputy-president of the Food-Rationing-Winding-Up-Commission,” his job title would have been Lebensmittelzuschlusseinstellungskomissionsvorsitzenderstellvertreter.

In a perfect world he would then moonlight as a Gesundheitswiederherstellungsmittelzusammenmischungsverhältniskundiger, Bismarck’s term for an apothecary.

In his library he would keep the Antipericatametanaparbeugedamphicribrationes Toordicantium, mentioned by Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall, in which the phrenologist Mr. Cranium describes anatomical structures as osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary and osteosarchaematosplanchnochondroneuromuelous.

And he would vacation in Bristol, whose spa waters were described by the English medical writer Edward Strother (1675-1737) as aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic.

Or perhaps he should just stay in Madrid.

remugient
adj. bellowing again

In 1997, University of Edinburgh linguistics professor Geoffrey K. Pullum submitted the following letter to the Economist:

‘Connections needed’ (March 15) reports that Russia’s Transneft pipeline operator is not able to separate crude flows from different oil fields: ‘they all come out swirled into a single bland blend.’ This is quite true. And worse yet, the characterless, light-colored mix thus produced is concocted blindly, without quality oversight, surely a grave mistake. In fact, I do not recall ever encountering a blinder blander blonder blender blunder.

It “would have been a true first in natural language text,” Pullum wrote, “a grammatical and meaningful sequence of five consecutive words in a natural context that are differentiated from each other by just a single character.” Alas, the Economist chose not to print it.

vespertilionize
v. to turn into a bat

I’ll prove the word that I have made my theme
Is that that may be doubled without blame,
And that that that thus trebled I may use
And that that that that critics may abuse
May be correct. Yet more–the dons to bother–
Five thats may closely follow one another:
For well ’tis known that we may safely write
That that that that that man writ was right.
Nay, e’en that that that that that that followed
Through six repeats the grammar’s rule has hallowed,
And that that that (that that that that began)
Repeated seven times is right! Deny’t who can.

— Anonymous

A leading paper decides that the plural of titmouse is titmouses, not titmice. ‘On the same principle,’ says another paper, ‘the plural of a tailor’s goose is gooses, as, indeed, we hold that it is.’ This reminds us of an anecdote with regard to a country merchant, who wanted two of these tailor’s irons, several years ago, and ordered them of Messrs. Dunn and Spencer, hardware merchants. He first wrote the order: ‘Please send me two tailor’s gooses.’ Thinking that this was bad grammar he destroyed it, and wrote as follows: ‘Please send me two tailor’s geese.’ Upon reflection he destroyed this one also, for fear he should receive live geese. He thought over the matter till he was very much worried, and at last, in a moment of desperation, he seized his pen and wrote the following, which was duly posted: ‘Messrs. Dunn and Spencer,–Please send me one tailor’s goose, and–hang it! send me another.’

— Tit-Bits From All the Most Interesting Books, Periodicals, and Newspapers in the World, Oct. 22, 1881

curtain-lecture
n. a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed

That’s from Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, which is more colorful than one might suppose. It also defines cough as “a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity” and lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.”

Yet worse was the condition of the editor who, having in a touching obituary notice of a soldier described the deceased as a ‘battle-scarred veteran,’ was driven frantic to find in the morning that the types had made him write of a ‘battle-scared veteran.’ The next day he published the following apology for the blunder: ‘The editor was deeply grieved to find that through an unfortunate typographical error he was made to describe the late gallant Major H. as a “battle-scared veteran.” He tenders his sincerest apologies for the mistake to the friends and relatives of the deceased; but to every reader of this journal acquainted with the feats of the major, it must have been apparent that what the editor wrote was bottle-scarred veteran.’

— “Some Humors of the Composing-Room,” Macmillan’s Magazine, December 1897