On the importance of correctly spelling the word "cologne"

Witness more of this at Sad And Useless. (via @apelad)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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pfooti

This is an instance of a phenomenon that just yesterday I learned is called an “eggcorn”. Using incorrect words that probably sound like the word you think it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
- Mark Dow
  
  The lesson here is don’t tweet on the spurt of the moment.
  - RJ
    
    spurt of the moment
    
    Skeet skeet
- Cefeida
  
  http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/browse-eggcorns/
  
  I started reading the list in that article just for kicks, and ended up pretty upset.
  My grasp of English was only intermediate by the time I got online, and the internet was a natural resource… I can still remember being extremely confused by a lot of these ‘eggcorns’. So many people online were writing ‘should of’ and ‘bare with me’ that I would end up thinking these were bona fide…I’m sorry, ‘bonified’ alternate expressions.
  
  The worst part is, I’ve noticed myself substituting homophones in cases where I’d never done it before. Right for write. Their for there. I know the difference, but seeing it written with a mistake in so many places messes with your head.
  - Stephen Olsen
    
    I’m doing the same now with French, sort of. I wind up spelling things by sound… in French. “I chould have”
    - Cefeida
      
      Rofl! I can relate. Ever seen French spelled with the Polish alphabet? I still have notebooks full of that. I was five and it had never occurred to me that different languages had different spellings. ‘Bonżur, komą sa wa?’
      - Sparg
        
        Thanks! I can read the French with the Polish spelling more easily than with the French spelling. I taught one of my Russian instructors how to say the word “oil” by writing it in Cyrillic, though the Southerners in class drove her nuts with “erl”.
  - Ipo
    
    ’Bare with me’ is correct.
    Let’s all get naked!
    - Cefeida
      
      If only!
  - penguinchris
    
    They’re so common that what is jarring to me is when I see people using things correctly.
    
    Though this is more common when it comes to proper use of apostrophes, which is exceedingly rare on the internet.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      I’m not exactly a language reformer what with still using the subjective and whatnot, but I would be fine with getting rid of apostrophes. Cases where spelling-sans-apostrophe or context don’t make meaning perfectly obvious would be extremely rare.
- McGreens
  
  Um, surely it’s a malapropism, no?
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism
  - wrybread
    
    Or a spoonerism…
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism
    - pfooti
      
      I’d say that eggcorns are a strict subset of eggcorns. I’d also say that they’re not spoonerisms (A well-boiled icicle) – those tend to be either clever or silly, but aren’t precisely the same.
      
      Still, words are pretty awesome.
      - Cefeida
        
        Word.
Antinous / Moderator

Speaking of the dull-witted, apparently Twitter is full of people who didn’t realize that the Titanic was a real ship until the anniversary the other day.
- IamInnocent
  
  Well, one can say that Cameron certainly made it quite unbelievable with his film.
- http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
  
  Oh Dobbs, say it ain’t so.
  - retepslluerb
    
    http://failbook.failblog.org/2012/04/10/funny-facebook-fails-these-people-had-no-idea-titanic-was-a-real-ship/
    - bcsizemo
      
      Makes you wonder how many people have no idea where this meme is originally from:
      http://farm1.staticflickr.com/2/1362599_02bcdea730.jpg
      - retepslluerb
        
        An episode of “The Waltons”.
        
        Season 5, Episode 20
        
        http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0743772/
      - teapot
        
        Thank you sir… I’ve never seen that one and will now live a richer life thanks to your hard work.
rattypilgrim

A cologneoscapy doesn’t sound so bad.
- IamInnocent
  
  ”Escaped from colon” ?
  - Brood-X
    
    A cologneoscapy is when you reach fifty and clean out your medicine cabinet and remove old toiletries.
    - Darryl Friesen
      
      +1 for you sir.
voiceinthedistance

Giving someone the benefit of the doubt is often a nice gesture, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a colon is just a colon.
jasonsho

I find Cream-filled Collon to be delicious.
Brian Mack

I just spell it Köln.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  I’m sticking with Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium.
  - mesocosm
    
    I was very impressed by the Colon Cathedral.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Did you know that Crystal Ball Cologne brought Catholicism to the New World?
      - mothernatureseven
        
        so that is what happened to all the natives – they were catholicized.
  - retepslluerb
    
    Though Colon Carnival does have a certain charme, considering that alcohol and close contact are involved.
jimh

Twit-literacy will bite us all in the ass pretty soon.
- suburbanhick
  
  You can’t have Twitter without Twits.
Boomer

My beloved grand aunt used to call her bone doctor a “choirpractor.”
- Cefeida
  
  He he he.
  
  Reminds me of how “Raising Hope” has the most wonderful malapropisms and portmanteaus thrown in ever so casually. “Vaginacologyst” made me spit out my dinner a few weeks ago.
- teapot
  
  That’s so adorable! I can’t believe she thought chiropractors are doctors!
http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair

Everybody knows it’s spelled cuh-LOG-nuh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC23d8gttq8
http://www.aarongilliland.com/ Aaron Gilliland

These people are clearly suffering Oldtimer’s disease.
- pfooti
  
  I mean, for all intensive purposes, it’s the same right?
  - http://dewimorgan.livejournal.com/ Dewi Morgan
    
    Is that some kind of youthamism?
    - Piedmont
      
      Supposubly oldtimers is on the rise in young people.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      No, but it might apply to youth in Asia.
  - mappo
    
    I don’t think you can take that for granite.
- princessalex
  
  That’s because their head are no longer in tack.
http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

When offered a correction, it’s interesting how many poor spellers automatically go on the defensive.

It must be a pretty fucked-up world to live in, where people taking pity and offering help somehow appear as hectoring bullies or something…

Attitude fail, bigtime. Marked in every written utterance.
- mothernatureseven
  
  maybe people should offer help and leave the “taking pity” attitude out.
  - http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
    
    Who said anything about rubbing anyone’s nose in it?
    
    Got another way of describing the motivation to offer assistance to the handicapped?
    - Guest
      
      not in your case
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

Spotted in a market in Jerusalem, 1995:

A box of laundry detergent named COLON:

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/www/colon.GIF
- bcsizemo
  
  While intentionally a spoof, Saturday Night Live created their own fiber cereal, Colon Blow.
  http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3U4q5j-1gEA/Sm4BR55ye9I/AAAAAAAABx8/SFYQDLqtarY/s400/colonblow3.jpg
mothernatureseven

I think it is mostly conservative christians who misspell it.
Guest

So is AXE body spray a semicologne?
- bcsizemo
  
  As apposed to a ;
  - Guest
    
    first, yes, you got the joke. Please add to it rather than spell it out. Second, you misspelled oppose.
- Jer_00
  
  AXE is one of the few colognes out there that I would agree should probably be spelled as “colon” instead. That stuff stinks – especially when it’s overused (which, in my experience, seems to be “any time it is used”).
  - Guest
    
    Often overused, especially in college
http://egypt.urnash.com Egypt Urnash

man I want a flavored colon. It’ll be like hair color! Today my hair’s blue and my colon tastes like blueberries to match! Tomorrow it’s red with strawberry colon!
Reiner Kukulies

That’s funny, because i live in colon :)
- Ipo
  
  Michigan or Nebraska?
fishyswaz

Before the remodel, there was a great colon shop in the Fukuoka strain station:
Daemonworks

Ah, delicious, delicious Japanese snack foods…
http://cn1.kaboodle.com/hi/img/b/0/0/20/9/AAAAC8Vp5XMAAAAAACCYjw.jpg?v=1230520096000
http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

Problem is solved by calling it after-shave, as god intended.

But yea, outside of your follow list Twitter is full of morons, the kind that frequent YouTube comments and style their hair with peanut butter.
Dignan

I love it when you can still smell your boyfriends colon on you.

- Jeffrey Dahmer
oasisob1

That second one in the pic above might be right; who knows what jaredgoddard gets up to on the weekends?
suburbanhick

Hey, are you some kinda pinko or what? What’s wrong with the old fashioned ‘Murrican spelling?
sharkmark

Has anyone around here considered the possibility that this was a joke among friends, perhaps poking fun at some misspelling at school or around the office? I realize the instinct of BoingBoingers to feel superior is pretty strong– note the jab at Christians above– but could we be the old farts who just don’t get the joke? Many of the comments sound like scoldy schoolmarms.
- surreality
  
  I doubt it. From reading all the examples, none of them seem anything other than a genuine attempt to refer to ‘cologne’. Other slips in spelling/punctuation don’t help either. I will, however, accept the fact that I’m a scoldy schoolmarm.
  edit: also, while I have made the ‘flavor’ instead of ‘scent’ mistake while speaking, I think one would catch it after tweeting it… unless you’re going to apply it to your colon, in which case maybe it IS a flavor.
- bcsizemo
  
  Yeah…no.
  
  I have seen plenty of people in car forums use the word breaks to refer to the parts of your car that stop you, ie your brakes.
  
  I’m horrible at spelling…that’s one of my alternative uses of google.
- Cefeida
  
  Notice the lack of likes and replies to that jab. I did a double take, wanted to ask ‘wtf’, then decided it was a troll best left alone.
bcsizemo

I keep thinking cinnamon enema…..
(So many BB posts, so little time.)
ill lich

Oakland A’s pitcher Bartolo Colon should have his own fragrance: “Colon in a Can.”
Jaunty Angle

You really should give credit to @dogboner for finding these in the first place. He finds a lot of the eggcorn Twitter mistakes that get passed around by others.
Jer_00

I’m waiting for the spelling shift on stuff like this. Spelling rules were codified in English with the birth of the printing press – prior to the printing press spelling was much more fluid and phonetic. The pronunciation of the language has changed a lot since then – there were some massive linguistic upheavals just within decades after the press was introduced to England.

As long as publishers acted as gatekeepers to content, spelling was going to stay fairly standardized – and prescriptive rules on spelling have prevented publishers from shifting those spellings much (though there has been some sanity introduced over the centuries). We’ve now entered a phase where text communication is pretty much democratized and outside the hands of elite gatekeepers (just as spoken language has always been – which is why there’s so much more variation in spoken language than in print) so I wouldn’t be surprised to see spelling shifts happen in the next century or so.

Though cologne -> colon isn’t one I suspect will stick (“colone” would be a much better choice for that one anyway, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that less funny misspelling wasn’t already being used on twitter without comment). Losing “igh” and “ough”, though, are shifts we’re already seeing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually stick.
- http://shadowfirebird.tumblr.com shadowfirebird
  
  Like dropping the u in “colour” or the e in “foetus”, I think there might be some resistance there…
  
  (Just confusing our US posters.)
  - jellyfishattack
    
    Our how Americans misspell “favourite” and “centre” – and pronounce “Lieutenant” like it’s spelled, not as it’s spoken in English English, and “foyer” as it’s spelled, not as it’s pronounced in French….
    - Pirate Jenny
      
      I say “foyay” for the same reason I don’t say “leftenant.” At least I’m consistent ;)
chrisheil

Greeting from, yes, Cologne ;)
http://twitter.com/john_olmstead John Olmstead

For years I thought a parcourse was a “park horse”. I remember thinking they did look a little like wooden horses.
jellyfishattack

Obviously, these people weren’t born in Canada (mandatory French lessons until Grade Ten); and then there are the English-speaking kids who take all their classes in French – even through University. Too bad I’ve forgotten most of my French (I went to Grade 13). I think if I coudn’t spell cologne, I’d write perfume instead!
- jellyfishattack
  
  In all fairness, Canadians are notoriously ignorant of Spanish, it does not appear on any of our packaging. We can’t even say “hello” in Spanish. When I was a kid, I thought that they spoke “Mexican” in Mexico. ;)
  - suburbanhick
    
    Too true. The ONLY Spanish many Canadians hear is José Féliciano’s “¡Feliz Navidad!” on the radio at Christmas time, or The Simpsons.
    - Sparg
      
      ¡Ay! ¿Dónde es mi tequila?
http://www.facebook.com/june.k.silverman June K. Silverman

Drinkin’ my coughee and thinkin’ of Mr. Colin Powell – Chillun! Lissen! call it aftershave
http://redwoodr.tumblr.com Redwood Rhiadra

This particular twitter search (with more entries) is number one on this list that I saw about an hour ago…

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/twitter-spelling-mistakes
http://www.facebook.com/ian.brewer1 Ian Brewer

Oh, I get it, colon :

It’s all in the punctuation.
teapot

Hate to spoil everyone’s fun (what am I talking about? I love doing it!) but my guess is that we are laughing at many people who are merely tweeting in their non-native language. When you all start tweeting in error-free Spanish you may resume making fun of people who are trying. “Colônia” is Portugese for cologne and “colonia” is the Spanish and “acqua di colonia” would be the Italian, so it’s pretty clear that a majority of these are simple mistranslations.

http://majordilemma.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/image001.jpg

(Yes, I’ll admit some of these are probably people who should know better, but many of them have Spanish/South-American names & handles… check the link in the article at least half of them are Latino)