Accidental juggling with the accepted order of letters opens the door on ideas and images uncatered for in our everyday world. Humo Streth listeners have warmed to the theme... I once finished a grave and serious letter to a company with the phrase 'enclosed is a coypu'. I never heard what he made of the absence of a large rodent.
Robert G Hardy
Molly Dickinson emailed her view on mitsakes
As a co-creator of a virtual world on the internet, I spend a great deal of my free time talking to people by typing. The un-editable nature of this form of communication leads to a great many typo's, but most of them are easy enough to decipher. However, I was told 'Os Plok' by one aquaintance and even he was quite at a loss to understand what he had intended to say. Os Plok! The phrase has now entered our vocabulary as a comment upon any sentence littered with errors. A simple muttering of 'Os plok' at once accepts the typos, apologises for them, and expresses some degree of frustration. It's quite wonderfully theraputic too! with those lovely round 'o's capped of with the definative glottal stop of the 'k' at the end. So if you're finding your fingers belie your intention, have an Os Plok on me.
And Andy Richford sums it up nicely with this one ...
My favourite occurred many years ago while I was working for a well-known and respected scientific publisher - a bastion of truth and accuracy. My boss had a new secretary and was not yet sure of her abilities to turn his audio tapes into perfect letters. So when he had to go away on business for a week he asked me to proof read and sign his letters in his absence. And so I found myself reading a long letter to an author assuring him of the care we took in copy editing book manuscripts for production - and here I quote, "in order to avoid embarrassing pissprints".
