14 thoughts on ““Taco Bell’s Canon””

1. I think reliance on spell-checkers is part of it. The average word processor isn’t going to have a problem with “Ivory League school”, “toilet trees” or “doggy-dog world”.

   1. It’s the auto-correct generation. Who needs feedback loops (in this case, checking your work and learning from mistakes), when machines think for me? Related, who needs to even know anything when there’s Google and wikipeedeeyuh to tell me what’s true?

   2. ding ding ding

      Of course the English language is so full of contradictions and special exceptions that it is hard for people to learn who have an expectation that rules are consistent from one instance to another.

2. Several years ago, in Washington State, a younger colleague wrote about “taking the intertube to the Columbia River.”

   I had no idea what the intertube was. Some sort of mass-transit system I’d never heard of?

   It turned out that he meant “inner tube.”

   Washingtonians generally don’t pronounce the “t” in words like “interstate.” Since he had only heard “inner tube” pronounced, he assumed it also had a silent “t.”

   Adding to the confusion was the fact he had never seen a real inner tube, used in a tire. He had always wondered why river rafts were called “intertubes.”

3. Related, Peter Schikele is correct when he says (in his routine) that Canon in D was written by the Marquis de Sade…

4. Gotta love those strictly plutonic relationships.

   It would be hysterically funny if it weren’t so depressingly sad….

5. What a bunch of maroons.

6. Taco Bell has a cannon? I guess they can back it up when they say “Drop the chalupa!”

7. Oddly enough, I had the opposite problem growing up. I knew how to spell words, but not how they were pronounced. Made for some embarrassing fox paws. 🙂

   1. My first week of college, I met a fellow new freshman who wasn’t stupid, but who had the same problem as you, except he pronounced that particular expression “f*cks pus”.

8. All young Americans should learn how the great frontiersman Taco Bell used his canon to defend the Alamo from General Quesadilla.

   1. …who retreated after the first attack failed.

      After that day, he was simply known as “Chicken” Quesadilla.

      1. So how did his brother “Cheese” get his nickname?

9. Of course Taco Bell has a canon.

   Taylor Mali has a wonderful bit on The The Impotence of Proofreading as well.

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