Howler, in the main sense this article deals with, is a glaring blunder, typically an amusing one.
The word howler is variously used. Some usages are seen as correct English, others as slang (see Howler for disambiguation). This article deals with the slang term in a sense that does not appear explicitly in the third edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (reprinted as corrected by Charles Talbut Onions 1967). It does however appear in more recent dictionaries[1] and in Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English; the 1951 edition of Partridge defined it in part as: "... A glaring (and amusing) blunder: from before 1890; ... also, a tremendous lie ... Literally something that howls or cries for notice, or perhaps ... by way of contracting howling blunder."[2]
Another common interpretation of this usage is that a howler is a mistake fit to make one howl with laughter, and that is the main theme of this article.
There are various colloquial usages of howler, such as the following, largely obsolete, examples, derivatives of the intensifier "howling", as in howling wilderness,[3] (Deuteronomy 32:10)[4] They are most often to be encountered in books of the late 19th to early 20th century:[2]
The sense of howling blunder seems to have survived better than most, and that is the theme of the rest of this article.
All over the world, probably in all natural languages, there are many informal terms for blunders, but in English the nearest rival for howler in the sense dealt with in this article, is the mainly United States and Canadian slang term boner. Like howler, boner can be used in any sense to mean an ignominious and usually laughable blunder, and also like howler, it has been used in the titles of published collections of largely schoolboy blunders since at least the 1930s.[5]
Boner means much the same as howler in the context of this article, but its other meanings differ. For one thing, boner is not traditionally used as a general intensifier or for specifically describing an accident or the like, as howler and howling are. Assorted other terms have much longer histories and some of them are not regarded as slang. For example Bull and Blunder have long been used in similar senses, each with its own overtones and assorted extraneous meanings. Bulls and Blunders, an American book published in the 1890s,[6] uses the word howler only once, in the passage: "Miss A. C. Graham, of Annerley, has received a prize from the University Correspondent for the best collection of schoolboy howlers". Although he did not otherwise use the word himself, the author apparently saw no need to define the term, so it must have been fairly familiar on both sides of the Atlantic even at that time, although perhaps not as well established a usage as now.
Mathematicians sometimes speak of howlers, mainly in the form of an error which leads innocently, but inappropriately, to a correct result.[7] However, the distinction between mathematical howlers and mathematical fallacies is poorly defined and the terminology is confused and arbitrary; hardly any uniform definition is universally accepted for any term. Terms related to howlers and fallacies include sophism, in which an error is wilfully concealed, whether for didactic purposes or for entertainment. In one sense the converse of either a howler or a sophism is a mathematical paradox, in which a valid derivation leads to an unexpected or implausible result.[8] However, in the terminology of Willard V. O. Quine, that would be a veridical paradox, whereas sophisms and fallacies would be falsidical paradoxes.
Typically such definitions of the term howler or boner do not specify the mode of the error; a howler could be a solecism, a malapropism, or simply a spectacular, usually compact, demonstration of misunderstanding, illogic, or outright ignorance. As such, a howler could be an intellectual blunder in any field of knowledge, usually on a point that should have been obvious in context. In the short story by Eden Philpotts[9] Doctor Dunston's Howler, the "howler" in question was not even verbal; it was flogging the wrong boy, with disastrous consequences.
Conversely, on inspection of many examples of bulls and howlers, it appears that often they simply are the products of unfortunate wording, punctuation, or point of view. Schoolboy howlers in particular sometimes amount to what Richard Feynman called Perfectly reasonable deviations from the beaten track.[10] Such specimens may variously be based on mondegreens, or they might be derived from misunderstandings of fact by the elders, teachers or communities. Not all howlers originate with the pupil.
A no doubt fictitious, but illustrative, example appears in Poaching in Excelsis, apparently written in part at least by G. K. Menzies (B. 1869).[11] It expresses a Scottish poacher's stupefied reaction to a newspaper report that 'Two men were fined £120 apiece for poaching a white rhinoceros.' . That Scot was patently skilled in his own field, and interpreted the report in a perspective that was bounded by his experience of having struggled to carry off a poached stag, hence the howler; it had little to do with his own intelligence or competence as a poacher in Scotland. He simply had no idea that poaching rhinos in Africa differed qualitatively as well as quantitatively from poaching small game in Scotland.
Terms such as howler do not specify the discipline in which the blunder was perpetrated. Howlers have little special application to any particular field, except perhaps education. Most collections refer mainly to the schoolboy howler, politician's howler, epitaph howler, judicial howler, and so on, not always using the term howler, boner or the like. There are various classes in mood as well; the typical schoolboy howler displays innocent ignorance or misunderstanding, whereas the typical politician's howler is likely to expose smugly ignorant pretentiousness, bigotry, or self-interest.
The howlers of prominent or self-important people lend themselves to parody and satire, so much so that Quaylisms, Bushisms, Goldwynisms, and Yogiisms were coined in far greater numbers than ever the alleged sources could have produced. Sometimes such lampooning is fairly good-humoured, sometimes it is deliberately used as a political weapon. In either case it generally is easier to propagate a spuriously attributed howler than to retract one.
Collections of howlers, boners, bulls and the like are popular sellers as joke books go, and they tend to be popular as reprints, as Abingdon, for example, remarks in his preface.[5] One contributory reason among many might well be a strong tendency for people to enjoy laughing at the blunders of stereotypes from a comfortable position of superiority. This applies especially strongly when the object of the condescension and mockery is a member of some other social class or group. National, regional, racial, or political rivals, or occupational groups such as lawyers, doctors, police, and armed forces, all are stock targets of assorted jokes; their howlers, fictional or otherwise, are common themes. Older collections of cartoons and jokes, published before the modern sensitivity to political correctness, are rich sources of examples.[12][13][14]
Sometimes, especially in oppressed peoples, such wit takes on an ironic turn and the butt of the stories then becomes one's own people. Very likely such mock self-mockery gave rise to the term Irish bull (as opposed to just any bull) and to works such as Samuel Lover's novel Handy Andy.[15]
Similarly the Yiddish stories of the "wise men" of the town of Chelm[16] could be argued to be as rich in self-mockery as in mockery. There are many other examples of mixed mockery and self-mockery, good-natured or otherwise.[17][18]
Howlers "in the wild" include many misuses of technical terms or principles that are too obscure or too unfunny for anyone to publish them. Such examples accordingly remain obscure, but a few have reappeared subsequently as good faith entries in dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and related authoritative documents. In the nature of things, encyclopaedic and lexicographic sources rely heavily on each other, and such words have a tendency to propagate from one textbook to another. It can be very difficult to eradicate unnoticed errors that have achieved publication in standard reference books.[19]
Professor Walter William Skeat coined the term ghost-word in the late nineteenth century. By that he meant the creation of fictitious, originally meaningless, words by such influences as printers' errors and illegible copy. So for example, "ciffy" instead of "cliffy" and "morse" instead of "nurse" are just two examples that propagated considerably in printed material,[19] so much so that they occasionally are to be found in print or in usage today, more than a century later, sometimes in old books still in use,[20] sometimes in modern publications relying on such books.
Apart from the problems of revealing the original errors once they have been accepted, there is the problem of dealing with the supporting rationalisations that arise in the course of time. See for example the article on Riding (country subdivision), paying particular attention to the reference to farthing and the sections on Word history and Norse states. In the context of such documented material the false etymology of "Riding" is particularly illustrative: "A common misconception holds that the term arose from some association between the size of the district and the distance that can be covered on horseback in a certain amount of time".
As a notorious example of how such errors can become officially established, consider the extant and established name of Nome, Alaska. Allegedly it originated when a British cartographer copied an ambiguous annotation made by a British officer on a nautical chart. The officer had written "? Name" next to the unnamed cape. The mapmaker misread the annotation as "C. Nome", meaning Cape Nome. If that story is true, then the name is a material example of a ghost word.
Nome certainly is an example of how such assertions often are disputed; an alternative story connects the source with the place name: Nomedalen in Norway.
For misuse of technical terms to produce howlers, is so common that it often goes unnoticed except by people skilled in the relevant fields. One case in point is the use of "random", when the intended meaning is adventitious, arbitrary, accidental, or something similarly uncertain or nondeterministic. Another example is to speak of something as infinite when the intended meaning is: "very large". Some terms have been subject to such routine abuse that they lose their proper meanings, reducing the expressive power of the language. Imply, infer, unique, absolute and many others have become difficult to use in any precise sense without risk of misunderstanding. Such howlers are widely seen as a pernicious, but probably unavoidable, aspect of the continuous change of language.[21] One consequence is that most modern readers are unable to make sense of even early modern books such as the First Folio of Shakespeare or the original editions of the Authorized King James Version of the bible.
The popularity of nautical themes in literature has tempted many authors ignorant of the technicalities, into embarrassing howlers in their terminology. A popular example is in the opening line of the song Tom Bowling by Charles Dibdin. It refers metaphorically to a human corpse as a "sheer hulk". The intent is something like "complete wreck", which is quite inappropriate to the real meaning of the term. In literature, blunders of that type have been so common for so long that they have been satirised in works such as the short story by Doyle: Cyprian Overbeck Wells, in which he mocks the nautical blunders in the terminology Jonathan Swift used in Gulliver's Travels.
In contrast to tales representing people's rivals as stupid or undignified, it is easy to believe that most schoolboy howlers are genuine, or at least are based on genuine incidents; any school teacher interested in the matter can collect authentic samples routinely. However, it is beyond doubt that the collections formally published or otherwise in circulation contain spurious examples, or at least a high degree of creative editing, as is variously remarked upon in the introductory text of the more thoughtful anthologies.[5][22] It most certainly is not as a rule possible to establish anything like definitive, "pedantically correct" versions with "authentic wording", even if there were much point to any such ideal.
John Humphrys relates the following experience, upsetting, but certainly not unigue: ...The headline above one of the stories on my page read: "Work Comes Second For Tony And I". In case you did not know, newspaper headlines are written not by the contributors but by sub-editors ... I was shocked. That a sub on the Times should commit such a howler was beyond belief.[23]
That sub's blunder was a classic example of a journalistic howler.
Charles Babbage presented a very characteristic reaction of the intellectual to the howler when he wrote: 'On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.'[24] Although one could see this as a politicians' howler, it is too common a form for that. However badly the question nonplussed Babbage, something of the kind emerges whenever a layman so radically fails to understand the logical structure of a system, that he cannot begin to perceive the matching logic of the problems that it is suited to deal with.
Probably the most prominent anthologisers of howlers in the United Kingdom were Cecil Hunt[25][26] and Russell Ash.[22] In the United States, probably the most prominent was Alexander Abingdon.[5] According to Abingdon's foreword to Bigger and Better Boners, he shared material with Hunt at least. However, since their day many more collections have appeared, commonly relying heavily on plagiarism of the earlier anthologies.
Here are a few short, illustrative examples of mainly schoolboy howlers culled from various collections:
Examples of retention of misinformation, or where information is presented in an unfamiliar context:
Unfamiliar instruction heard without comprehension frequently leads to mondegreens and malapropisms:
Bull: a confusion of wording often related vaguely to a valid idea; not all howlers are bulls in this sense, but the following are:
In extreme examples of bulls it is hard to guess exactly what the pupil had in mind, or how to correct it. Perhaps the following one stems from some idea that Shakespeare’s works were written by someone else. Whatever its origin, it is a prime example of how a howler, and in particular the paradoxical aspects of a bull, presumably inadvertently, may constitute deeper comment on the human condition than most deliberate epigrams:
Sometimes the pupil simply may have been groping for any answer that might placate the examiner.
Some howlers are disconcertingly thought-provoking or look suspiciously like cynicism.
As already remarked, not all howlers are verbal: