PETER BUFFA -- Comments & Curiosities

Octothorpe.

Know what it means? Neither did I. Great word, though, isn’t it? It’s a

thoroughly useless bit of information I picked up this week. I’ve been

torturing everybody I know with it.

I’ll tell you what it means when we’re done. No peeking!

I’m sure you’ll do better than I did. My guess was “an eight-man team of

Native American Olympians.” I was immediately disqualified.

Anyway, that got me thinking about words and word games -- two of my

favorite subjects, along with useless information, of course.

Malapropisms have the highest entertainment value, in my humble opinion.

Malapropisms are named for Mrs. Malaprop, a hopelessly ditsy character in

an 18th century comedy called “The Rivals.” Mrs. Malaprop always had

something to say, but never, ever got the words right. Close, but never

right -- as in, “I resemble that remark.”

It pains me to say this, but when it comes to malapropisms, no one can

hold a candle to Dan Quayle. Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Tiger Woods,

Dan Quayle. He’s that good.

Quayle’s finest hour was a speech he gave at a benefit for the United

Negro College Fund. Commenting on the fund’s famous slogan -- “A mind is

a terrible thing to waste” -- Quayle mused, “What a waste it is to lose

one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that

is.”

There were plenty of others, no less noteworthy.

Quayle on time travel: “We don’t want to go back to tomorrow, we want to

go forward. I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good

judgments in the future. The future will be better tomorrow.”

As a motivational speaker: “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of

failure.”

On parenting: “Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a

mother and child.”

On history: “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history.

I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I

didn’t live in this century.”

Transitioning from history to geography: “We have a firm commitment to

NATO. We are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are

a part of Europe.”

And finally, on the burdens of his office: “One word sums up the

responsibility of any vice president. And that one word is: to be

prepared.”

Oddly enough, George W. Bush seems to have contracted malapropitis even

before getting to the White House.

On John McCain after the South Carolina primary: “The senator has got to

understand he can’t have it both ways. He can’t take the high horse and

then claim the low road.”

Bush on business, from a Daily News interview: “I understand small

business growth. I was one.”

OK, now I’m confused. Were you the Texas Rangers, or were you the oil

company?

Misplaced modifiers and mistakes in usage create a separate, but no less

interesting, class of malapropisms.

I found this collection of actual headlines from newspapers and titles

from magazine articles in my files:

Include your children when baking cookies; Drunk gets nine months in

violin case; Prostitutes appeal to Pope; British left waffles on Falkland

Islands; Enraged cow injures farmer with ax; Plane too close to ground,

crash probe told; Miners refuse to work after death; Deer kills 17,000;

Juvenile court to try shooting defendant; Stolen painting found by tree;

Sisters reunited after 18 years in checkout line; Killer sentenced to die

for second time in 10 years; Kids can make nutritious snacks; Local high

school dropouts cut in half.

And, my personal favorite: Panda mating fails, veterinarian takes over.

Animal science can be very demanding.

Another variation is the spoonerism -- a sort of verbal dyslexia. People

prone to spoonerisms inadvertently swap initial letters or syllables, so

that a “crushing blow” becomes a “blushing crow.”

This particular mouth malady was named for a 19th century Oxford

clergyman named William Archibald Spooner, who was apparently the reason

decaffeinated tea was invented.

Spooner was permanently stuck on fast forward, always frantic about

something, with this terrible habit of swapping initial letters. He

secured his place in history when he burst into the outer office of an

Oxford dean and blurted out to his secretary, “Sorry, but is the bean

dizzy?”

Spooner was actually a very bright man and a highly respected academic,

but he just couldn’t break the habit. As his reputation spread, the

church was filled to the rafters whenever Spooner delivered a sermon,

with parishioners on the edge of their seats waiting for the next tip of

the slung.

In one sermon, he reminded the faithful that “Our Lord is a shoving

leopard.”

Before an important wedding, he noticed a dignitary sitting on the wrong

side of the church. He approached discreetly and whispered, “May I sew

you to another sheet?”

But the problem was never worse than when he was angry or upset. When one

of his star students was caught in a prank, he said he couldn’t believe

the student had been stupid enough to “... fight a liar in the

quadrangle.”

He railed at another young man who’d been suspended for excessive

absences: “You have tasted two worms!”

Yeah, but just think how the kid’s parents felt. All that money to send

him to Oxford, and he tastes two worms. Little brat.

Well, OK then -- octothorpe. Ready? If I find out you already looked,

there’s going to be pell to hay.

You may not know what it means, but you use one every day, sometimes over

and over again. Octothorpe is the proper name for ... pound sign. Can you

believe it? All these years you’ve been dialing all those numbers,

followed by the pound sign, and you never had a clue what that little

thing is called.

So let the rest of the world and that incredibly annoying voice mail lady

call them “star” and “pound.” From now on, it’ll be asterisk and

octothorpe for you and me. Don’t thank me.

I gotta go.

* PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Fridays. He

can be reached via e-mail at o7 [email protected] .