RECREATIONS.—By D. M.

Auckland Star, Volume II, Issue 543, 6 October 1871, Page 2

RECREATIONS.—By D. M.

No. I.

JL CHAPTEB OF BLUUDEBS AND MISTAKES,

,\n absurd little error Which occurred in a (elegram the other day, and which nearly ..jave me a four hours' journey for nothing, *et me to recalling various kinds of blunders and mistakes I have come across 'ither in reading or experience; and aa iome of these are curious, I shall present a few to the reader.

The telegraph does such magical work for us day by day that its errors are apt to be forgotten in our admiration of its celerity and general accuracy. "Yet, when the wires are affected by storms or its clerks by carelessness, the '* telegraph makes dreadful blunders. There •ire firms in Glasgow that could furnish any number of illustrations. In one case, the mere misplacing of a point was like to have embroiled two companies in a lawsuit. The case was this : The message vya^ sen —"You can have the hundred pieces ufc sixteen and nine. Thoasand , aaore at same xate." As delivered \tM London it read—"You can have the hundred pieces at sixteen, and nine thousand more at same rate," —on which understanding, or misunderstanding, the goods were ordered. At a meeting of the Liverpool Chamber 1 of Commerce, Mr. Horsfall, M.P., complaining of the irregularity and incorrectness with which telegrams were transmitted then (matters are improved ■iow) to and from India, instanced a message sent to one gentleman in Calcutta , >"o inform him that his wife [in England] jj had presented him "with a fine daughter." The message informed him instead, that his wife had presented him " with live daughters." lv another case, a husband anxiously awaiting news of an interesting event at home, received, per wire, the staggering announcement, —"Your wife had a fine box this morning !" Another gentleman who had ordered his gig to await him at the station, was understood from the tolegram to require the attendance of his c pig! The following story was told me by a clergyman in Philadelphia. A preacher who had accepted a call to a pastoralcharge in a Western State, was prevented from starting on the day appointed by < reason of the want of a quorum to proceed' ; with his ordination. A telegram was accordingly despatched to the deacons —"Presbytery lacked a quorum to ordain." Before these words reached their destination they had got themselves - twisted into the following extraordinary shape:—" Presbytery tacked a worm on to Adam." The deacons, on receipt of this : message, were utterly bamboozled—could make nothing of it; but, after long con- ; imitation, came to the conclusion that their new minister had got married, and that' ~„ this was his facetious way of making them aware of it. They accordingly took the supposed hinf. and provided lodgings for' two instead of one. -V •'^Reverting to punctuation —the point with which we started —it is a moral lesson on the power of " littles," to'notice _f how completely the alteration of thex*> smallest punctuating n.<ark may change the sense of a whole passage. Recently, in an auctioneer's list, the misplacing of a little hyphen Introduced, _■•, amongst the articles for sale, " 20001 camels' hair-brushes" —an item that ought . ■ to have been interesting to Mr. Darwin.. : An American paper reported, on one, : occasion, the capture, in mid-channel, or | j '• a large man-eating shark." Another — paper, copying the paragraph, but lew careful about the punctuation, reported that " a large man, eating shark, was captured in mid-channel." It is well that Heaven knows where commas are wanting, or the poor soldiers scrap to his wife, "May Heaven cherish and keep you from yours affectionately John D ," might have led to unwishedfor consequences. y In the report of Convocation (June «O»,Jj;; 1861), a little error in punctuation, along.fi with a slip in grammar, caused the--, deliverance of one bishop to appear in me .: following startling form:— M -His -contention (said the report) was that there 1 was nothing in the Mosaic statements; < which were at variance with the discoveries of modem science." What he meant of course was, not (h&t there was nothing in the Mosaic statements, but that in ■ the Mosaic statements there was., nothing at variance with science. As an illustration of the power ot a comma to control, and, when shifted, to utterly reverse the meaning of a sentence, thefollowing story is told :— lv Kaniessa, there dwelt a prior of great liberality, who, j

caused these lines to be written over his door— j ■■ Be open evermore, O'tiion my door, „ To none be shut, to honest or to poor. m* successor, a priest of the name o. fafnE Ws as nig^rdly as the other S? been bountiful. . He did not even go to the expense of paintin^out the lines , he rimply altered the position of one point, which made the couplet readthus''■ReopMievermMe.Otlioumydooi-, TonH.beshuttohonestortopoor."

Eeina aftei &Lrfa deprived of his position S'ccount of his niggar^ness it passed into a proverb that, tor one point Ravnbard lost his priory. P A somewhat similar anecdote is told of a barbS who had a couplet over his door without any punctuation at all, but which the' passer-by read thus :— " {^v^uKJthing and give you a drink." If any victim went in to avail himself of this apparently magnanimous offer he found that the barber's reading of it was: —

"S^ftTlEEftlnf andgiveyoua drink f to Which his reply was, of coarse, ft Tn'on'e case,by the misplacing of jtat compositors call a » space,' a gentleniaa, instead of sending a bulletin to the Lord Provost, was made to send a bullet into him Whether it brought him a visit from Captain M'Caul is not known. In columns of news an absurd effect is often produced unintentionally by the running together of items that ought to have begun on different lines. In one of SaTieSg papers in Paris the following paragraphs, printed without a break, must have read ominously : — . «Dr X. has been appointed head physician to the flopital do la Obarifce. orders have been issued by the authorities for the immediate extension ot tue Cemetery de Parnasse."