One of the fringe benefits of being an English or History teacher is receiving the
occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay. The original classroom blunder probably dates
back to the day that some unsuspecting pupil first touched quill to parchment.. All the fluffs and
flubs, goofs and gaffes and boo-boos, blunders, and bloopers that I share with you today are
genuine, certified, and unretouched.

The results range from the pathetic to the hilarious to the unintentionally insightful. The
title of this column, for example, is based on a famous classroom faux pas: “In 1957, Eugene
O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise.” Other students have given bizarre twists to history by asserting
that Wyatt Burp and Wild Bill Hiccup were two great western marshals and that the inhabitants
of Moscow are called Mosquitoes.

Sometimes the humor issues from a confusion between two words. Working
independently, students have written, “Having one wife is called monotony,” “When a man has
more than one wife, he is a pigamist,” “A man who marries twice commits bigotry,” and
“Acrimony is what a man gives his divorced wife.”

While one student reminisced, “Each Thanksgiving it is a tradition for my family to shoot
peasants,” another observed, “In 19th century Russia, the pheasants led horrible lives.” And,
reversing a “g” and “q,” a young man once wrote, “When a boy and a girl are deeply in love,
there is no quilt felt between them.”

Sidesplitting slips like these are collected by teachers throughout the world, who don’t
mind sharing a little humor while taking their jobs seriously. I offer my favorite student howlers,
each skewed and skewered sentence a certifiably pure and priceless gem of fractured English and
worthy of a Pullet Surprise:

• Although the patient had never been fatally ill before, he woke up dead.
• Arabs wear turbines on their heads.
• When there are no fresh vegetables, you can always get canned.
• It is bad manners to break your bread and roll in your soup.
• We had a longer holiday than usual this year because the school was closed for altercations.

Students often revise history beyond recognition:

• The Great Wall of China was built to keep out the mongrels.
• The Puritans thought every event significant because it was a massage from God.
• A landmark in Paris is the Eyeful Tower.
• The President of the United States, in having foreign affairs, has to have the consent of the Senate.
• The difference between a king and a president is that a king is the son of his father, but a president isn’t.

Bloopers abound in all types of classrooms. Take these (please!) from Science class:

• Our new teacher told us all about fossils. Before she came to class, I didn’t know what a fossil looked like.
• Elephants eat roots, leaves, grasses, and sometimes bark.
• Dinosaurs used to smell bad, but they don’t anymore because they are extinct.
• A liter is a lot of newborn puppies.
• The equator is an imaginary lion that runs around the world forever.
• Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries, vanes, and caterpillars.
• A skeleton is a man with his outside off and his inside sticking out.
• In Chemistry class, we studied mean old acids.
• Without electricity we would still be in the Dark Ages.
• Many women believe that an alcoholic binge will have no ill effects on the unborn fetus, but that is a large misconception.
• Heredity means that if your grandfather didn’t have any children, then your father probably wouldn’t have any, and neither would you, probably.
• Genetics explains why you look like your father and, if you don’t, why you should.
• When you breathe, you inspire. When you do not breathe, you expire.
• Last year many lives were caused by accidents.
• A molecule is so small that it can’t be seen by the naked observer.

Students of the world, rewrite! We who are about to grade salute you! All teachers who
receive such bloopers tell themselves that the laughter is not at the students but at what they have
written. After all, as one young scholar has written, “Adolescence is the stage between puberty
and adultery.”