Thursday, January 11, 2007

Irony of the Day

This is from Cotterell & Turner's Linguistics & Biblical Interpretation, 60:


"And yet again we are, in fact, dealing with the question of linguistic competence . Assuming...that Lessing had a clear intention, but that his text did not fulfil that intention, we must further assume that had he carefully considered his text he could have (would have?) perceived the textual error and corrected it. For some reason at the time of producing the text his linguistic competence failed him: and we all of us share in that experience from time to time..."

1) The paragraph is about "linguistic competence."
2) They misspell "fulfill"
3) They are talking about a textual error another author made that needed to be corrected.
4) Last, here it is, they say Lessing's "linguistic competence failed him" and immediately follow it with a textual/linguistic error - "and we all of us share in that experience from time to time." Not only that but the error is in a sentence that is trying to say we all make mistakes.

I just think that is a priceless paragraph. Now, I better go back and grammar check/spellcheck everything!

1 comment:

Lisa said...

Hmmm ... come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen a typo on your blog.

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