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I have always had the tendency to say the wrong thing.  As a teenager, I heard a saying that I had to adopt, “I only open my mouth to exchange feet.”  It hasn’t gotten much better doing things through email or online.  Now I still say the wrong stuff, but due to those fat fingered / slippery key typos.  I have all kinds of whoops going on at times.

One of my big speech problems is a tendency to Spoonerisms, dyslexic  transposition of full words or parts of words.  Here’s the Wikipedia definition with some funny examples:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism.  It happens for a lot of people and some people all the time.  The best example I ever saw was a weatherman who meant to talk about cold air masses, but instead reported that there was a possibility of cold mare as_ _ _ ,  you get the drift. 

So a couple of years ago when I saw the children’s book Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook by Shel Silverstein, I had to get it.  Even as an adult, I loved reading about Toe Jurtle, Goctor Doose, Bumping Jean, Rirty Dat, Flutterby, Batty Meaver, and of course the star of the book, Runny Babbit.  It is wonderfully illustrated throughout with cute black and white line drawings.

What started me thinking about my oopsies was a thread on Etsy that was talking about a feature I thankfully hadn’t become aware of with any of my keyboard slips.  It seems there has been a built-in automatic censor to keep offensive language out of titles and chats.  It has however had unintended consequences in some cases when someone did one of those keyboard typos. 

The thread I was reading provided a link back to a truly funny example from a thread in 2009 (now closed and archived, but still readable).  A woman intended to type in her discussion title as “What do you think about men’s shirts?”  Only she accidentally left the “r” out of shirts while typing.  The automatic Etsy censor replaced her unallowed word choice with something it was programmed to believe was more appropriate for a title.  So her discussion thread posted under the title:  “What do you think about men’s poops?”  Needless to say, it had quite a run and drew a lot of people into the thread. 

Others on Etsy reported it had been disconcerting to be discussing watching birds (tits) in the chats and have the automatic censor change what they were writing to boob watching.  As I program some things on the web for others to use, it is a cautionary tale of not making assumptions that everything is either black or white, on or off.  I don’t / won’t / can’t always know better than users.  Which brings me to a second favorite saying I saw years ago, “HUMOR, never leave home without it”. 

So this weekend, grave a heat time!