Sunday, January 14, 2007

A Little Bit of Knowledge

One of my favorite radio shows (and now podcast!!!) is "This American Life" from WBEZ Chicago. One of my favorite episodes (though there are many great ones) is #293 (which you can get to and listen to via the 2005 archive), titled "A Little Bit of Knowledge."

Act One. Small Thoughts in Big Brains. This American Life producer Alex Blumberg investigates a little-studied phenomenon: Children who get a mistaken idea in their heads about how something works or what something means, and then don't figure out until well into adulthood that they were wrong. Includes the tale of a girl who received a tissue box for Christmas, alledgedly painted by trained monkeys. (13 minutes)

Hilarious stories about the mistakes we make. I think that there's a unique opportunity with mass adoption of the Internet to explore a variety of mistaken information: misheard phrases.

I used to spend quite a bit of time in an online community which discussed a sports team. Every once and a while, someone would use the word "untracked," without having anyone comment on it. I was completely baffled as to what these people meant, then realized from context that they mean "on-track." But the mis-use was always hilarious. "I know we have a lot of injuries, but the coaching staff has to get us untracked."

Today, I saw a new one: "jump sh*t." What?! The author meant jump "ship." "Before you jump sh*t, you should figure out whether the grass is really greener on the other side."

Yes, the author mixed metaphors while making a mistake on one of the metaphors, but I'm not criticizing that. I just love collecting this kind of clearly long-standing mistake about what the original phrase was.

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