[bksvol-discuss] Re: The charm of scanning errors
- From: Cindy Rosenthal <grandcyn77@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:08:09 -0700
Both are funny., i.e., serisible is a wonderful new word, and Roger's
scanno is very funny. I'm glad you posted, misha, because often one's eyes
see what one expects to see and I read the original word as sensible. Were
youlistening to the scan? Is that why you caught serisible instead of
sensible? Or were you reading it (If I'd been proofreading I probably would
have caught it, but in your example I saw what I expected to see. smile
On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 8:21 AM, misha <mishatronics@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Once in a while, a scanning error goes beyond being just cute, funny or
> rude ... here's one from a sentence about a school for serendipity on Mars:
>
> Some other time I'd look over this grand array of nonsense and have myself
> a good laugh. Right now, I was in a hurry. The cab halted at the main
> entrance of the college. I took Yetta's hand and led her at a dead run
> inside the building. The college had the noisy silence characteristic of
> every educational institution I'd ever been in, orthodox or crank, composed
> of the resonance of many voices distant along echoing passageways. There
> was no one in sight. Swallowing hard to adjust to the pressure here—kept up
> to four for the benefit of the Bear majority among the students—we hastened
> along the entrance corridor until we came to a sort of assembly hall from
> which at least six others diverged. "Hell! Which way?" I snapped. Yetta
> pointed. "There's a bulletin board!" I strode over to it. Scanning the
> details posted for the students, I found such choice chunks of crankery as
> Harmony II, Adjustment to Planetary Rhythms, and Open Lecture: The
> Influence of Temperature and Humidity on Cross-Complex Luck Nexi,
> interspersed with serisible-sounding subjects such as probability in its
> application to card-games.
>
> * * *
>
> When I first read this, I thought, what a wonderful new
> word--serisible--for something that is intended to be taken both as solemn
> (serious) and as funny (risible). I'd have left it that way without
> checking the printed book, but a bit further in the book there was a
> different spelling of Yetta's name, so I searched backwards in the print
> copy to find other times when it was used and read what is actually in the
> book.
>
> I found such choice chunks of crankery as Harmony II, Adjustment to
> Planetary Rhythms, and Open Lecture: The Influence of Temperature and
> Humidity on Cross-Complex Luck Nexi, interspersed with sensible-sounding
> subjects such as probability in its application to card-games.
>
> Not only was my charming new word gone, sensible changed the whole meaning
> of the sentence *sigh*. I'm still going to start using serisible in any
> conversation where the topic at hand is both serious and risible.
>
> Misha
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