Pages

10 April 2008

Math tudors beware

A blog and a mission to stamp out typos in America.

Readers know there are a few typos around these parts.  With any luck, they don't distract from the rest of the content.

One local blog author seems to have missed the spell check button orientation briefing, hence one of the more hilarious phrases lately about two people who teach arithmetic.  Unfortunately, it came out as a couple who run about doing ye olde sums in codpiece, tights and puffed collar.

Then there was Gary Cake [note only one "r"]  - assistant secretary to cabinet for social policy - who in the rendering became Garry Cake, morphed to Carry Cake but never quite made it through the typo evolution to the anthropomorphized Cherry Cake.

Suddenly people are feeling a bit peckish, no doubt. A delicious treat with tea or coffee that can route e-mails using a blackberry.  Coat the letters with flour to keep them from sinking to the bottom of the page while they are being typed or baked or whatever.

Coffee and cake.

Cake and Coffey. 

Words are pesky things.

Others, meanwhile, may be having visions of Cherry Cake, the stripper.

Pole-dancing at the Cabinet Secretariat.

The Clerk must be doing something besides keeping his boss up to speed, and watching strippers or eating  are as likely as anything else.

The thought of Gary - by the by, as thorough a professional as one might find in his job -  in pasties and garters prancing about the 9th Floor to some raunchy concertina version of "Star of Logy Bay", is an image that those who know Gary may find arresting, if not downright disturbing. 

It is an incongruity to trump all other incongruities even if it is placed in a suitably folky context for the current crowd of nationalists, courtesy of the squeezebox grinding away in time to the flicking of hips.

Or maybe the Clerk's boss is the one who finds distractions that keep him from keeping up on what he gets paid to do.

But anyway, said typo farm raised even more puzzled stares the other day by ending a comment with three words:

"Your obsessed boy."

It gave the comment the feel of a haiku but without the adherence to form, at least in the front bit of the comment.

The sentence fragment remains curious since the preoccupations of my eldest child were totally unconnected to the discussion at hand.

Typos can be fun.

Feel free to share your favourites.

-srbp-