Guy who sends me stuff sends me a wunnerful blooper from the Tyler Morning Telegraph:
When William B. Holsonbake of Hughes Springs celebrated his 100th birthday last May 15, someone asked him how he had managed to become a centurion.
Read it all here, but the punchline is right there, living to age 100 and getting to be a centurion. If I make it to 100, I hope they don't make me learn Latin; second-language acquisition gets really hard in the advanced years.
My correspondent did remark, 'Pat, I hope you make it to triple digits, because you would cut quite the dashing figure in a big red-plumed helmet. And I'm certain you could put the sword to good use, smiting the ignorant and the illiterate[.]'
Well, we smote that East Texas turkey, anyhow. That 'centurion' is just another one of those painful missteps that happen when a writer substitutes for an unknown word a known word that's kinda close. In a happier world, a good editor would catch the blunder. In this world, all the editors are in meetings or updating their social pages or talking about their Tweets or something similarly useless.
4 comments:
I think you would kind of look like Marvin the Martian with the upside-down brush on the helmet!
It's amazing the amount of information at people's disposal these days; it is equally amazing that so many do not avail themselves of this help. What I have in mind is an incredible invention called a DICTIONARY. VicAd people - read it. Learn it. Live it.
My God, what do you VicAd folk want for nothin'? A rrrrrubber biscuit??
I really could see you in the helmet, but the short skirt, Not so much.
When I read the article on my laptop, there were words that were divided in mid-sentence. Did someone copy this and not know that you could put a word back together if it was in the middle of the sentence and not divided between two lines? Geeze, what did some of The Advocate staff go to work for this paper?
Live to be 100? Only if I could get a newer body with this older brain....better yet, I'll take a newer everything. My life's experiences are actually stored in my heart, rather than my brain.
I was hoping the Naugahyde tutu came in an age-appropriate mid-calf length. The little leg guards might serve to hide the shiny shins that one of the uglier but unremarked signals of age. Why do shins get shiny? The helmets are cool, though, without doubt.
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