Positive mutations

The Washington Post's "Style Invitational" invited readers to construct humorous "slips", although their rules were slightly different: add, subtract or change one letter, and supply a new definition. [Winners] The list below contains some "positive mutations" that I've encountered.

• My absolute favorite, from a colleague at Industrial Light & Magic:
  I need to make a short (2-3 min) film of a spider for an opera production.
  If you have a nice big scary one, I'd love to immoralize it on film.

• From another colleague at ILM, about ILM's proposed move to a new location, and the fact that we're one of four companies submitting plans for the property:
  does [it] seem that this company is more of a shoe in than the others?
  Hmm, perhaps the new space is so small that we'll need a shoehorn to fit everyone in? (She meant shoo in.)

• Seen on a package of bookcase-anchoring devices (so your bookcase doesn't topple over during an earthquake) for sale at Home Depot: "Provides discrete protection...". I'd rather it provide continuous protection, wouldn't you? (They meant discreet.)

• In response to a question about landlord-tenant disputes, the writer recommended picking up a particular reference book at Boarder's bookstore.

• The author of some lecture notes about digital media turned an audio stream into a whistling tea kettle (audio steam).

• Parctising my talk one more time before I head over. To get the joke here, you have to know that the talk was to be given at Xerox PARC.

• I am now firmly convinced that your parents were causal aquaintances.
  Posted on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.* (speaking to JMS) on 6 Dec 1996. Yes, I'd have to say that they were the cause and he's the effect. And I'm not saying that casually.

• I thought I'd lull you into a fall sense of security.
  Posted on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.* on 9 Nov 1996... so maybe it's a winter sense of security instead?

• The wife of man is nasty, brutish, and short.
  The original, by Hobbes, was "the life...". I can't remember the author of the mutated version.

• In a rec.humor.funny post (15 April 1995) about an "Internet Poster's License", the writer suggests that Depending on state law, one might also have to provide proof of libelity insurance. Did he mean "liability" or was "libel" deliberate? Either way, the premium's gonna be costly.

• Describing how a program crashed and core-dumped, the writer intended to say most horrible but instead produced mort horrible -- a fine description of the way his program died.

• Mazel tov , meaning "congratulations", or literally, "good thing", became mazel ton , meaning perhaps "may a ton of good things happen". For a whole list of this kind of one-letter-changed inter-language pun, click here.

• Recently, I've seen several examples of a general class of slips: authors confuse words that end in ents with related words ending in ence.
  
  • All the residence of the small town were very friendly.
  • This takes precedents over all other questions.
  And a related error:
  • For all intensive purposes... (should be intents and)

I'm also amused by the phrases that folks come up with when they hear words they don't understand. This happens most often when a journalist interviews someone about a topic unfamiliar to the journalist. The technical terms get mangled in sometimes-humorous ways.

Examples:

• At a public hearing on tidal marsh restoration, a refererence to "tidal prism" (the total volume of water that moves in and out on the tides) was recorded by the court reporter as "tidal prison". The inmates of this prison are probably rather "crabby"!

• The computer hacker who was reported as cracking route (i.e. he got the ROOT password).
  New York Times, 27 Feb 1995.

• Rutgers University's new laser-based tool for diagnosing ulcers doesn't run away. At least, that's what the journalist who turned non-invasive into non-evasive thinks.
  Reuters, 27 Feb 1995.

• In a for-sale newsgroup posting, someone advertised a bunch of kitchen gadgets, including a pearing knife . Now, I've heard Miss Manners mention fruit knives, but I didn't realize there were different kinds for specific fruits! (Okay, maybe I should have realized, given that grape scissors exist...)