RECREATIONS.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 135, 29 September 1871, Page 3

RECREATIONS.

No. I;—A CHAPTEB OP BLUNDEEB AND

MISTAKES

An absurd little error which occurred ifi a telegram the other day, and which nearly gave me a four hours' journey for nothing, set me to recalling various kinds of blunders and mistakes I have come across either in reading or experiences, and as some of these are curious, I shall present a few to the readeri

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 are firms in towns 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: A message was sent —"You can have the hundred* pieces at sixteen and nine. Thousand more at same rate." As delivered in 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 of Commerce, Mr. Horsfall, M.P., complaining of the irregularity and incorrectness with which telegrams were transmitted then (matters are improved now) to and from India, instanced a message sent to one gentleman in Calcutta to inform him that his wife [in England] had presented him " with a fine daughter." The message informed him instead, that his wife had presented him " with five daughters." In another case, a husband anxiously awaiting news of an interesting event at home, received, per wire, the stagering announcement —" Your wiie had a fine box this morning!" Another gentleman who had ordered his gig to await him at the station, was understood from the telegram to require the attendance of his pig ! The following story was told me by a clergyman in Philadelphia. A preacher who had accepted a call to a pastoral charge 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 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 consultation, 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 hint, and provided lodgingsfor two instead of one.

Reverting to punctuation—the point with which we started—it is a moral lesson on. the power of "littles," to notice how completely the alteration of the smallest punctuating mark may change the sense of a whole passage. Eecently, in an auctioneer's, list, the misplacing of a little hyphen introduced, amongst the articles for sale, " 2000 camels' hairbrushes "—an item that ought to have been interesting to Mr. Darwin. An American paper reported, on one occasion, the capture, in mid-channel, of "a large man-eating shark." Another paper, copying the paragraph, but less 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 soldier's scrap to his wife, " May Heaven cherish and keep you from yours affectionately John D ," might have led to unwished-for consequences. In the report of Convocation (June 20, 1861), a little error in punctuation, along <yith a slip in grammar, caused the deliverance of one bishop to appear in the following startling form:—" His contention, (said the report) was that there was nothing in the Mosaic statements ; which were at variance with the disco varies, of; modern science."

What he meant of course was, not that 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 of a comma to control, and, when shifted, to utterly reverse the meaning of a sentence, the following story is told:—ln Eamessa, there dwelt a prior of great liberality, who caused these lines to be written over his door—- " Be open evermore, O thou my door, To none be shut, to honest or to poor." His successor, a priest of the name of Raynhard, was as niggardly as tue other had been bountiful. He did not even go to the expense of painting out the lines ; he simply altered the position of one point, which made the couplet read thus—- " Be open evermore, 0 thou my door, To none, be shut to honest or to poor." Being afterwards deprived of his position on account of his extreme niggardliness, it passed into a proverb that "for one point Raynhard lost his priory." A somewhat similar anecdote is told of a barber who had a couplet over his door without any punctuation at all, but which the passer-by read thus—- " What do you think ? I'll shave you for nothing 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—"What! do you think I'll shave you for nothing and give you a drink?" to which his reply was, of course, a negative. (To be continued.)