Joke’s on Students in These Bloopers, Malapropisms

Richard Lederer, a former prep school teacher who lives in San Diego, has compiled what he swears are actual student bloopers sent by teachers around the country. Pasting the mistakes and malapropisms together by subject, he creates twisted vignettes that he displays on his web page, The World According to Student Bloopers, https://www.intrepidsoftware.com/bloopers.html (See Launchpoint, above). Most are pulled from his books, “Anguished English,” “More Anguished English” and “Fractured English,” but he’s always adding to the pile.

In honor of this week’s April Fool’s Day, here are excerpts from Lederer’s history of the world. Misspellings are courtesy of the students:

Without the Greeks, we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns--Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths . . . one myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in “The Iliad,” by Homer. Homer also write the “Oddity,” in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

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Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks . . . at Roman banquets, the guests wore garlic in their hair . . . Nero was a cruel tyrany who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them.

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Then came the Middle Ages . . . The Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense.

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The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of their human being . . . Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money and is famous only because of his plays.

During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic.

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Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands . . . On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposedl insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.

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Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltaire invented electricity and also wrote a book called “Candy.” Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees.

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Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian and half English . . . Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

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France was in a very serious state. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened. . . . Napoleon wanted an heir to inheret his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn’t bear him any children.

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Queen Victoria was the longest [British] queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. Her reclining years and finally the end of her life were exemplatory of a great personality. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

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The nineteenth century was a time of many great inventions and thoughts. The invention of the steamboat cause a network of rivers to spring up . . . Samuel Morse invented a code for telepathy. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the “Organ of the Species.”

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Lederer welcomes your bloopers, your comments, even the bad puns you can’t foist off on anyone else. Write to him at 9974 Scripps Ranch Blvd., #201, San Diego 92131, or e-mail him at [email protected]. And he leaves you with this thought: What is correct? Nine plus seven IS fifteen? Or: Nine plus seven ARE fifteen? The correct answer: 16.