Do you ever see a sign or other text in passing very quickly and then your brain tries to fill in what it thought it read, only to realize a moment later that there’s no way in hell that sign/text said that?
This happens to me all the time. I asked my G+ friends what this phenomenon is called and nobody knew, so we made up our own terms. We’re the Internet. We totally get to do that.
The consensus was that the formal or clinical term should be “misparsing”, since “malapropism”, “Mondegreen”, and “paronym” are all more about speaking or hearing versus visual input gone awry.
Further, it was pointed out that if mistyping is colloquially known as a “typo” then misreading should be a “reado”, which I wanted to misread as “sharkreado” in keeping with the overall and inexplicable sharknado theme to this blog (which really ought to be a monkeynado theme but that brings up visions of the monkeyloo having a tornado in it which I’m fairly certain would use up our entire security deposit on the rental house so let’s never speak of monkeynadoes again). Therefore the consensus was that “sharkreado” ought to be the colloquial version of “misparsing”.
And further still – because if it’s possible to push things too far, this blog remains blissfully unaware of such limitations – I realized that part of my particular problem with misparsing is that my brain fills in the nerdiest possible interpretation regardless of what actual nerdery exists in the original sign/text. Therefore the syndrome that causes misparsings/sharkreadoes is FNAAH, which stands for Fucking Nerdy As All Hell.
All of this comes together thusly…if you happened to be on a bus going quickly down the street and out of the corner of your eye you saw this sign on a building:
And if you happened to have a critical case of ongoing FNAAH, you would misparse or sharkreado that sign as:
Which the Bing Klingon Translator (OMG an actual use for Bing!) assures me should be written as “tlhIngan DuSaQ Qob” or:
And then thereafter whenever you were on a bus passing that building (which would be pretty often if you take busses into the central bus terminal of Cambridge), you would picture a bunch of fully-armoured Klingons in there learning how to pirouette with bat’leths, which would be not only fucking nerdy as all hell but also fucking awesome as all everything.
