Massive Malapropism Madness, Vol. II

It's that time again. It's the end of the semester and I'm combing through dozens of essays. Whether it's lack of sleep or just the brain-melting effects of reading so much student writing, a few strange turns of phrase have caught my attention the last day or two, and I knew you'd want to hear about them. Mind you, if I had been paying better attention in the grading session on Wednesday, I'd have a few dozen more to add here, but as it is I'll just entertain you with a few examples.

My 101 class has produced a couple of interesting statements. One student was writing about the spread of Christianity during the late Renaissance and bemoaned the cruel treatment of "the ingenuous peoples of South America." No matter what your opinion of the inhabitants of the southern-western hemisphere, to call them liars is just not okay. Once again, spell checking on the computer does not pick up all errors...

The same happened to another student writing about public transportation, only this time in such a way that I wasn't at all certain it was a mistake to begin with. The student was pleading for better public transport in Southern California, because such measures would help "to move the asses of young and old to their destinations in comfort." I had to read the sentence a few times, and I had nearly concluded that the student actually meant that, either in a fit of colloquial language or as a transcription from a less-formal draft into the final. Finally it occurred to me that she probably meant masses of people. That made me feel better, though it was hard to apologize to the person at the next table whom I had sprayed coffee all over upon first reading the passage.

Then came my 914 class finals, in which they had to write an essay on Orwell's Animal Farm. Now, if you know anything about Orwell at all, you can probably guess that his writing is going to be political in nature. No matter how much we discussed this in class, the students were bound and determined to read what they wanted into the text. The final question asked them to write on one of the lessons that Orwell might have been trying to convey in the novel. It's a low-level class and I'm pretty generous on such matters, but you wouldn't believe how many people wrote to me that Orwell's main point was to get people to be nicer to animals. No, really. The treatise on the animal revolution at Manor Farm, the power struggles between the elitist pigs Napoleon and Snowball, the parallels with communism, the eventual transformation of the pigs into creatures so closely resembling their former human masters that the animals can no longer tell them apart--all this to get us to be a little less mean to cows and chickens.

Most of the responses were also hopelessly muddled and convoluted. Take, for example, this sentence that is meant to discuss the relation between two characters:

I also think that out of all the characters that they had the most comparing and contracting, but more then less comparing."

Um... okay. If you say so.

Some of them became disturbingly bizarre and made me uncomfortable:

Napoleon sensually sanded another pig to say or simplify his long speeches.

I read that over and over, and I still cannot figure out what it was supposed to say. I'm open to ideas, 'cause what's there now disturbs me deeply.

On the other hand, this contained a timely warning:

What the book was trying to tell us was not to be mean to animals, that they have mines and they want to live.

Aaaaahhh! They have mines! Yes, I suppose we definitely should be nice to them. Imagine:

Farmer Bob: (walking to the pasture with a bucket in his hand) Hey, you rotton cows! Stupid filthy bastards! Here's your--"

KA-BOOM!

(A huge explosion rocks the meadow. As the smoke clears, we see, Monty Python-style, Farmer Bob's smoking boots. After a few seconds, the twisted and charred bucket drops to the ground from the sky.)

Cow: (smugly) Moo.

Remember: be kind to the species below us. They're armed, and they demand respect.