Say What?

Sedum, found here

I was grading papers over the weekend and came across some comments that brought forth a chuckle:

"Her asthma was exasperated by stress." [exacerbated]

"All my uncles had prostrate issues." Does this mean all the men in that family couldn't get off the floor?

And this on an instruction sheet written by a voice teacher who is trying to help me get better breath control when I sing: "Wrap something snug around your waste like an ace bandage or a sweater." Yick.

I just love it when people tangle up their words like this. It can be especially challenging when the wrong thing is said in a setting where you can't laugh.

The husband of one of my father's dying patients once tearfully confided in him, "I was the one who broke her hyphen sixty years ago" [hymen]. Daddy bit the inside of his mouth trying not to react to this remark.

One church service in my memory has taken on a life of its own. During the morning prayer my pastor decided to weave the title of his sermon into the prayer in a rather clever way. The title was, "The Plight of the Clay Pot" and was based on Romans 9:21. As everyone was carried along with the pastor's prayer, he uttered these enigmatic words:
"And Lord, as we consider the clight of the play plot...the plate of the clay clot...the plight of the ply plot...the clate of the pie plot...." I snuck a look at the other pastors. Two of them were covering their mouths and one was shaking with laughter. I shut my eyes as the pastor said with real emotion, "Oh Lord, you know our hearts..." and moved on in his prayer. There were a lot of twinkling eyes at the end of that prayer!

Another time, I excused myself from the church pew to make a quick bathroom stop before the service began. When I stepped back into the pew the organ was playing. Mother and my friend, Pam, however, had their heads in their hands and were laughing so hard they were wiping tears off their faces. I'm not sure how much they got out of the sermon because they were laughing off and on throughout the morning and it seemed that one didn't dare look at each other.

They later told me that as they had been waiting for the sermon to start, they commented on the hill ascending from the garden that could be seen directly through the floor to ceiling window behind the altar.
"What would you do if you could landscape that, Pam?" Mother asked.
Pam looked at the hill, devoid of much vegetation, and stated that she'd put spring flowers at the base of it and maybe a fountain somewhere nearby.
Reflecting momentarily on her love for seadum, Mother announced, "If it were up to me, I'd love to see an avalanche of semen out on that hill."
Pam sat immobile, staring at Mother in what she later called "therapist face" and nodded woodenly. "Really?"
My father suddenly took an interest in the conversation and turned in the pew to look at Mother. Was she all right?
As she heard her words ring in her mind, she suddenly realized what she said. "Did I say what I think I said?" she asked, horrified.
That was when the giggling started. We have never let her live that one down.

Once, Dr. Spooner, after whom the term "spoonerisms" was named, offered a salute to the Queen of England by saying, "Three cheers for our queer old dean!"
He later tried to comfort his students with patriotic rhetoric: "When our boys come home from France, we will have the hags flung out!"

A radio announcer who had recently visited the queen reported that he had been met "with a twenty-one son galoot." Indeed.

We humans need to express ourselves. Delightfully, some do it with real creativity!