Blitz of Fun

Friend Marion bestowed upon me a cheer-up gift of a wonderfully entertaining little book called Ignorance is Blitz, a compendium of hilarious student solecisms compiled by Anders Henriksson. I've had to limit myself to three pages at a time because I start laughing so hard that I hover near apoplexy.

Fiorella saw plenty of these mishaps during her college teaching career and enjoyed every one of them. There's something so solid about things being "taken for granite." At first she wrote down the best ones, then decided she was being mean and chucked her list. Now she wonders if it would have bought her fame and fortune.

The spell-check errors we always have with us. For instance, students misspell "definItely" as "definAtely" and the unthinking computer corrects it to "defiantly," which is definitely not what the writer meant at all. And then there is my personal favorite, a sad widow being described as "melon colony."

Other mistakes were carefully thought out by students, like the one who wrote about the "lonely sole." I corrected her to "soul" and she promptly hauled out a dictionary that defined "sole" as being "the only one." I finally retreated to grammar, pointing out "soul" was the noun she wanted, while "sole" was an adjective.

Not that teachers don't screw up sometimes. Friend Paula, who had a student who memorably invited her to "please bare with me," confesses to once thinking "notary public" was a "note of republic" and euthanasia referred to "youth in Asia."

Fio must add one of her own gems: she once described the wooden floor of her home to her late mother-in-law as "parfait."

"I think you mean 'parquet,'" M-in-L said, without batting an eye.

Bless her. But then, she was the one who pronounced "ga-zee-bo" as "gaze-bo" all her life.