Howlers and Bloomers..!
The English language is quite particular in its expectations and expects its users to be quite precise in its usage, however very often through goof ups by printers, editors and writers the public are treated to a choice of howlers and bloomers.
This morning I read a report quoting Vengsarkar the chief of selectors saying that “Rahul is an experienced player, so is Sachin. If something happens to Dravid, God forbid Sachin can lead.”
I laughed out loud realizing that what poor Vengsarkar meant was that god forbid anything should happen to Rahul and not ‘god forbid’ Sachin should lead!
Lots of newspapers have had such bloomers in their pages:
In Bombay a local newspaper carried a report: A young wife while drawing water from a well, slipped and fell. Cries of alarm brought a lorry driver who was passing by. He immediately ‘drove’ into the well and rescued her!
Poor housewife!
From an All India Tourist Guide: About 160 kilometres from Calcutta is Santi Niketan which attracts a lot of scholars from all over the world. It is good to see classical Indian dancing and samples of other performing ‘rats’!
Some years ago the government did exchange a bunch of terrorists for a plane load of passengers at Kandahar, but I never realized it was a national habit till I read a news item in the Times which read, ‘the police said that a case of murder cum dacoity had been registered and efforts were on to ‘trade’ the suspects.’ I was a little perturbed till I was told later by the kind editor, that the police had still not been able to ‘trace’ the dacoits!
And from Goa from where I’ve just returned a report in the Navhind Times: ‘The dead body of a hotel worker was found ‘living’ near the Church square!’ Locals in Goa boast about miracles that have happened in this once colony of Portugal, but this I’m sure must have excited a lot of pilgrims till the paper corrected the mistake the next day: Sorry readers, the body was quite dead and only ‘lying’ in the square!
And in the south came this news item from a very established newspaper that had many women activists up in arms till the conservative editor in proper dhoti and kurta mentioned even ‘we make mistakes!’ The item appearing in the Classifieds section innocently said, ‘Wanted science graduates for selling engineering hardware and stenographers!’ A little like Vengsarkar’s goof up, don’t you think?
Like I said English is a hard to please mistress and we slaves who have decided to woo, use and sell her wares have to be careful all the time. I’d like to end with one that seems strangely too close to the truth for comfort: ‘The Maharashtra government said that sugar will be supplied on a ‘fist’ come first basis!
Whoa! Whoa! Was that a mistake or the truth?
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