A large class of schoolboys' blunders consist in a confusion of words somewhat alike in sound, a confusion that is apt to follow some of us through life. ``Matins'' has been mixed up with ``pattens,'' and described as something to wear on the feet. Nonconformists are said to be persons who cannot form anything, and a tartan is assumed to be an inhabitant of Tartary. The gods are believed by one boy to live on nectarines, and by another to imbibe ammonia. The same desire to make an unintelligible word express a meaning which has caused the recognised but absurd spelling of sovereign (more wisely spelt sovran by Milton) shows itself in the form ``Tea-trarck'' <p 159>explained as the title of Herod given to him because he invented or was fond of tea.[13] A still finer confusion of ideas is to be found in an answer reported by Miss Graham in the University Correspondent: ``Esau was a man who wrote fables, and who sold the copyright to a publisher for a bottle of potash.''
[13] Cornhill Magazine, June 1888, pp. 619-28.
The following etymological guesses are not so good, but they are worthy of registration. One boy described a blackguard as ``one who has been a shoeblack,'' while another thought he was ``a man dressed in black.'' ``Polite'' is said to be derived from ``Pole,'' owing to the affability of the Polish race. ``Heathen'' means ``covered with heath''; but this explanation is commonplace when compared with the brilliant guess—``Heathen, from Latin `h<ae>thum,' faith, and `en,' not.''
The boy who explained the meaning of the words fort and fortress must have had rather vague ideas as to masculine and feminine nouns. He wrote: ``A fort is a place to put men in, and a fortress a place to put women in.'' <p 160>
The little book entitled English as she is Taught, which contains a considerable number of genuine answers to examination questions given in American schools, with a Commentary by Mark Twain, is full of amusing matter. A large proportion of these answers are of a similar character to those just enumerated, blunders which have arisen from a confusion caused by similarity of sound in the various words, thus, ``In Austria the principal occupation is gathering Austrich feathers.'' The boy who propounded this evidently had much of the stock in trade required for the popular etymologist. ``Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle because it is so beautiful and green.'' ``Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.'' ``The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.''
Some of the answers are so funny that it is almost impossible to guess at the train of thought which elicited them, as, ``Climate lasts all the time, and weather only a few days.'' ``Sanscrit is not used so much as it used to be, as it went out of use 1500 B.C.'' The boy who affirmed <p 161>that ``The imports of a country are the things that are paid for; the exports are the things that are not,'' did not put the Theory of Exchange in very clear form.
The knowledge of physiology and of medical subjects exhibited by some of the examined is very amusing. One boy discovered a new organ of the body called a chrone: ``He had a chronic disease— something the matter with the chrone.'' Another had a strange notion of how to spell craniology, for he wrote ``Chonology is the science of the brane.'' But best of all is the knowledge of the origin of Bright's disease, shown by the boy who affirms that ``John Bright is noted for an incurable disease.''
Much of the blundering of the examined must be traced to the absurd questions of the examiners—questions which, as Mark Twain says, ``would oversize nearly anybody's knowledge.'' And the wish which every examinee has to bring in some subject which he supposes himself to know is perceptible in many answers. The date 1492 seems to be impressed upon every American <p 162>child's memory, and he cannot rest until he has associated it with some fact, so we learn that George Washington was born in 1492, that St. Bartholomew was massacred in that year, that ``the Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492 under Julius C<ae>sar,'' and, to cap all, that the earth is 1492 miles in circumference.
Many of the best-known examination jokes are associated with Scriptural characters. One of the best of these, if also one of the best known, is that of the man who, paraphrasing the parable of the Good Samaritan, and quoting his words to the innkeeper, ``When I come again I will repay you,'' added, ``This he said knowing that he should see his face again no more.''
A School Board boy, competing for one of the Peek prizes, carried this confusion of widely different events even farther. He had to write a short biography of Jonah, and he produced the following: ``He was the father of Lot, and had two wives. One was called Ishmale and the other Hagher; he kept one at home, and he turned the other into the dessert, when <p 163>she became a pillow of salt in the daytime and a pillow of fire at night.'' The sketch of Moses is equally unhistoric: ``Mosses was an Egyptian. He lived in an ark made of bullrushes, and he kept a golden calf and worshipped braizen snakes, and et nothing but kwales and manna for forty years. He was caught by the hair of his head, while riding under the bough of a tree, and he was killed by his son Absalom as he was hanging from the bough.'' But the ignorance of the schoolboy was quite equalled by the undergraduate who was asked ``Who was the first king of Israel?'' and was so fortunate as to stumble on the name of Saul. Finding by the face of the examiner that he had hit upon the right answer, he added confidentially, ``Saul, also called Paul.''