The young laugh. The old know.

Does a rainbow exist? It's a beautiful thought.

At any rate, don't go digging there.

Question - What would you call the chariot of the Sun?

Answer - An awesome cart.

After reading a number of 'jokes' or 'mottoes' that people have had the effrontery to insert in crackers and pass off as humour, I propose to set up a joke factory with stricter quality control. The start-up already has a number of visionary backers.

The investors and I hope in time to completely automate the process but for now we've had to rely on humans to craft our jokes. The first joke has just been delivered. Remember you read it here first.

Question: What do you call an angry worm that goes "Hey nonny no"?

Answer: A mad wriggle singer.

A mondegreen is where a phrase is misheard and interpreted as something which sounds more or less the same, but is actually quite different from what was actually said.

For example, a speaker might say "What's that toy left on the chair?" and a listener think they said "What's that toilet on the chair?" This is a real example that occurred today, I haven't made it up.

This kind of linguistic error was first called a mondegreen by Sylvia Wright, who wrote that as a child she heard the first verse of a Scots ballad as

Only later did she realize that there was no lady Modegreen. The Earl was the sole victim, and they laid him on the green.

Well-know mondegreens include

One that a friend told me was the "Potato clock". Whatever is a potato clock? Well, "We need to get a potato clock". Better set the alarm then!

Mondegreens have attracted the attention of psychologists. In The Language Instinct Steve Pinker pointed out that the interesting fact that what the listener hears is often considerably less likely than the intended version. My examples of the toilet on the chair and the potato clock certainly have this property. Pinker interprets this as evidence that we hear what our auditory systems tells us (even though it's an unlikely meaning), not necessarily what makes sense in the context.

I wondered if I could systematically generate some mondegreens and hit upon the idea of reading verse to my dictation software. The latter must try to match sounds to stored words, using some kind of "goodness of fit rule, and I'm pretty sure it will also take into account what words are the most likely ones to follow a given word. I don't think it has a model of the world though, so what it recognizes should fit together plausibly as a word sequence, but might not mean the same as what I actually said.

And sure enough it came up with some modegreens. Here are a couple that amused me. See if you can spot the originals!

"Good thing which this last looked out."

"A poor player structure in French is out upon the stage."

– Someone called Pam was giving away cake with cherries in

– Genoa?

– No, she was a stranger

Our dynasty couldn't afford to own our own snake. But we aspired to rent one.

We never wrote poems. It could get you killed, and we were risk-averse.





I was recently reminded about Educating Rita, a play and film which present education as a journey of self-discovery.

Watching the film anew, I got to where OU student Rita (Julie Walters) gatecrashes alcoholic lecturer Frank (Michael Caine's) seminar on tragedy, because she's just seen a performance of Macbeth, and has been blown away by it.

The literary sense of tragedy, Frank explains, is a great person brought down by a character defect, not just the popular meaning.

Rita's response is something like, "I don't understand all that. It's just such a great story!"

At this point Macbeth jumped in. I forgot about all educating Rita and straightaway watched a couple of film versions of the Scottish play.

The first was the 1978 version with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. There have been many films of the play but this may have set a gold standard.

The second was from 2010, with Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood. I'd never seen this version before but found it astonishing and compelling. It's set, not in medieval Scotland, but in some 20-centrury totalitarian country, a sort of Stalin's Scottish Soviet Union. Sometimes new settings for plays don't work, but this one succeeds brilliantly.

Macbeth is a somber play, and Macbeth's last soliloquy unrivaled in its bleak despair. I decided I would learn by heart it, though, to add it to the few bits of Shakespeare I know. Here's my test, do I have it right?

Where I grew up all the families fought one another. Ours was at the bottom of the feud chain.

The price of balloons has shot up. Inflation.