Probably due in great part to hasty rereading after spell checkers have done
their devilish job of hacking things up:-)

RiB

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 12:42 PM, cdb <colin@btech-online.co.uk> wrote:

>  From today's Daily Telegraph (UK one) of malapropisms  from some final
> year papers.
>
> Among the gems from this year's undergraduate exams are an economics
> student at City University in London student who attributed Northern
> Rock's downfall to the "laxative enforcement policies".
>
> In literature, a student from Bath Spa University wrote of Margaret
> Atwood's book: "The Handmaid's Tale shows how patriarchy treats women
> as escape goats."
>
> A University of Southampton student concerned by global warming wrote
> that: "Tackling climate change will require an unpresidented
> response."
>
>
>
> This I like the best -
> And a fellow undergraduate concerned by the threat of diseases, wrote:
> "Control of infectious diseases is very important in case an academic
> breaks out."
>
> Other examples come from students at St Helens College of Art and
> Design near Liverpool, who were asked to "outline the importance of
> the four Noble Truths to the Buddhist faith".
>
> One offered the baffling response: "Nirvana cannot be described
> because there are no words in existence for doing so. Not
> non-existence either, it is beyond the very ideas of existing and not
> existing."
>
> This must have been submitted by a former politician known for his
> tortuous mangling of some piddly language he called English..
>
> Students at the same university were asked to outline the importance
> of the railway in 19th-century Britain. One wrote: "The railways were
> invented to bring the Irish from Dublin to Liverpool where they were
> promptly arrested for being vagrants", while another responded: "The
> railways were invented to take the weight off the motorways."
>
> A student at the University of the West of England in Bristol
> astonished his tutor by spelling the subject of one of his favourite
> topics wrong: "alchol" instead of "alcohol". Another wrote "whom"
> instead of "womb" in an anatomy paper, and one replaced the word
> "abdominal" with "abominous".
>
> Sir, your hypogastric region is totally abominous to me.
>
> I wonder if the collective noun for a group of lecherous (er
> lecturers) is an epidemic of academics?
>
> Colin
>
>
> --
> cdb,  on 28/08/2008
>
>
>
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