Over the last several decades, even though I have worn many
hats, I think that basically I am a teacher. But I am also a
verbivore. No, I don’t eat my words (well, once in a while); I only
enjoy words and wordplay. I like to indulge in them.
I admit that I did not invent the word verbivore. Credit for that
goes to a man called Richard Lederer. He also was a teacher. And
like any other teacher, during his career, he had come across
bloopers by his students. One day he got the following from one
of his students. “The Government of Greece was democratic
because the people took the law into their own hands.” An idea
hit him. Why not collect all the bloopers like this from all his
students? And at the end of the year he got quite a few. Then he
thought, why not get it from other teachers? Other schools in the
district? Other schools in the state? From schools across the
nation? From colleges?
And he got literally a mountain of material. The issue now was
what to do with all the stuff. So he wrote a book and called
it Anguished English: An Anthology of Accidental Assaults
Upon Our Language. Basically it had an introduction to each
chapter followed by a list of howlers. It soon became a bestseller.
The most popular part of the book is a
section called The World According to
Student Bloopers, where Lederer
skillfully pasted together genuine
howlers
collected
by
teachers
throughout the United States, from the
eighth grade to college level, into an
alternate history of the world.
Space limitations prevent me from
reproducing the whole history here. I
have picked and chosen a few while
maintaining a sort of continuous history.
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