Errorist returns

November 19, 2025 @ 8:02 am · Filed by under Humor

« previous post | next post »

In the comments on "Final prepositions again", AntC alerts us to Elle Cordova's latest, part III in the Grammarian Saga: "Grammarian vs Errorist showdown at the secret L'error".

Part I was: "Grammarian vs Errorist – a supervillain showdown"

And Part II: "The Errorist strikes again!"

For some background on the negatively-evaluated version of the term grammarian, see here.

Update — Google's auto-generated transcript for this clip is, appropriately, full of strange errors.

  • "Grammarian" is variously rendered as "Grimarian" and "Grim Marion".
  • "Malaprop" is "Maliprop".
  • "Errorist" is "arist" as well as "errorist" (in lowercase).
  • "Misprint" is "Missprint".
  • "fastidious" is "festious".
  • "apostrophic" is "apastrophic".
  • "evening run-ons" is "evening run What?"

November 19, 2025 @ 8:02 am · Filed by under Humor


7 Comments

  1. AntC said,

    November 19, 2025 @ 8:24 pm

    Thanks Mark,

    my humble l'error

    Doesn't work for me. (I can't smudge 'error' into a single syllable.)

    Is that a genuine pronunciation for some varieties of English?

  2. Mark Liberman said,

    November 20, 2025 @ 6:58 am

    @AntC "Doesn't work for me. (I can't smudge 'error' into a single syllable.)"

    Elle Cordova does it by brute force — I don't think "air" is her normal pronunciation of "error", at least not in phrase-final position, where her rendition is about 400 msec long.

  3. Stephen Goranson said,

    November 20, 2025 @ 7:03 am

    ?…cliffhanger

  4. Rodger C said,

    November 20, 2025 @ 10:39 am

    Is that a genuine pronunciation for some varieties of English?

    I once read a newspaper interview in which the reporter had an interviewee referring to "a clear case of driver air." This is common in rhotic American dialects.

  5. Bob Ladd said,

    November 20, 2025 @ 1:51 pm

    I agree with Rodger C that error -> air is perfectly possible in some rhotic American accents. In the same class is mirror -> mere. (On one of Joni Mitchell's early albums she rhymes "Nathan LaFraneer" and "in the rear-view mirror".)

  6. Rodger C said,

    November 21, 2025 @ 10:37 am

    And then there was the time when I referred in conversation to "the horrors of war" and another person thought I was referring to ladies that assuage soldiers. "No no," I said, "the HAHRAS of war!"

  7. Colin Watson said,

    November 21, 2025 @ 3:47 pm

    @AntC: Such a pronunciation seems quite natural to me, having grown up in Northern Ireland.

RSS feed for comments on this post