I was reading last night and found this stuff in Harper's magazine. Some of it made me laugh out loud. That's always a good thing. Unless you're trying to be quiet. Which I wasn't. Hooray for that, right? At any rate, these are the same mistakes people will likely always make. They're still funny, though. At least I think so.
[Hypotheses]
DARK MATTER
From a collection of errors and malapropisms by junior-high, high-school, and college students, submitted h their teachers to Richard Lederer, a syndicated columnist. Many of the following appeared in his book The Revenge of Anguished English, published this near by St. Martin's Press.
When a planet first forms, it is like a big ball of mucus.
Gravity is a pulling type thing that makes sure that the planets don't fall or hurt anything.
The law of gravity says no fair jumping up with out coming back down.
Copernicus's theory claimed that the sun was on the center of the earth.
Galileo showed that the earth was round and not vice versa.
Most books say the sun is a star. But it still knows how to change back into the sun in the daytime.
Before Galileo, no one could see the moon.
A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it wants to go.
Some oxygen molecules help fires burn while others help make water, so sometimes it's brother against brother.
In looking at water under a microscope, we find there are twice as many Hs as Os.
Water is composed of two gins, oxygin and hydrogin. Oxygin is pure gin. Hydrogin is gin and water.
CO, is lighter than air because leaves absorb it, and they are on top of trees.
Proteins are composed of a mean old acid.
When they broke open molecules, they found they were stuffed with atoms. But when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed with explosions.
Darwin's book stated that all animals evolved from primeval man.
Many dead animals of the past changed to fossils while others preferred to be oil.
Dinosaurs used to smell bad, but they don't any more because they are extinct.
The largest mammals are to be found in the sea because there is nowhere else to put them.
Men are mammals and women are femammals.
Clouds are high-flying fogs. I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing. Clouds just keep circling the earth around and around. And around. There is not much else to do.
Humidity is the experience of looking for air and finding water. We keep track of the humidity in the air so we won't drown when we breathe.
The cause of dew is the earth revolving on its own axis and perspiring freely.
To remove air from a flask, fill the flask with water, tip the water exit, and put the cork in, quick.
The wind is like the air, only pushier.
It is so hot in some places that the people there have to live in other places.
As the rain forests in the Amazon are shrinking, so are the Indians.
The Dutch people used windmills to keep the plants from sweating.
Mushrooms always grow in damp places and so they look like umbrellas.
The pistol of a flower is its only protection against insects.
The equator is an imaginary lion that runs around the world forever.
The union of the egg and sperm is called deception.
Women are reproducing too fast for mankind to keep up.
Heredity means that if your grandfather didn't have any children, then your father probably wouldn't have any, and neither would you, probably.
The three cavities of the body are the head cavity, the tooth cavity, and the abominable cavity.
The hookworm larva enters the body through the soul.
If conditions are not favorable, bacteria go into a period of adolescence.
Involuntary muscles are not as willing as voluntary ones.
The skeleton is what is left after the insides have been taken out and the outsides have been taken off. The purpose of the skeleton is something to hitch meat to.
Algebra was the wife of Euclid.
American time is behind British time because America was discovered later.
One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second. Momentum is what you give a person when they are going away.
I do so love reading. I learn so many things.