Language as a means for confusing people

I suffer from a medical condition that causes incoming communications to be scrambled. The condition is rarely discussed in doctor's offices, although persons of a comedic persuasion have been known to foregather at their usual watering holes to engage in open displays of the condition and then scurry home to write the best bits down for rehearsing tomorrow night's gig at the open mike improv night. Ronnie Barker turned his affliction into a nice little earner until he tired of showbiz and turned to dealing in antiques. Ronnie was married to the former Joy Tubb from 1957 until his death in 2005: who could resist proposing marriage to a woman with such a name? Owa Tana Siam!

When a blog reader identified a picture of green shoots sprouting from the early October soil as "probably Winter wheat" my brain scrambled that into "probably winter weight", which is a haberdasher's term for a Fall collection of clothing. It is worth noting that in England (Wikipedia is specific; the remainder of the UK is excluded by omission, deliberate or otherwise) a haberdasher (a word that appears in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales) is merely a pedlar of small sewing items such as needles, buttons, and zips. Granted, not zips; at least not in the fourteenth century.

Saint Louis IX, the King of France from 1226–70, is the patron saint of haberdashers in France, so although the term developed negative risible connotations in England in the sixteenth century, in America and elsewhere the grander sense of a haberdasher as a gentleman's outfitter has survived. In the City of London the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers (a stoutly Anglophone name, not like that suspiciously Francophone lot over at the Worshipful Company of Mercers) adopted Saint Catherine, she of wheel fame, as the patron saint of the guild. My condition instantly alerted me to the fact that Catherine was wheely famous and thus well qualified to be the patron saint of peddlers, in a variant of my condition that requires possession of both a British spelling dictionary and an American spelling alternative.

Language scrambling is particularly prevalent among Korean websites selling clothing: a Google search for [Winter wheat clothing] returned this result: "Jimmy pregnant, according to Winter wheat clothing pregnant women thick thermal underwear suit jacket pants Korean Buru Yi month of service". The worrying part is that it seems to make sense, notwithstanding that Jimmy avers that he could not possibly be pregnant as he has not even had a date since his partner ran away with a haberdasher over a year ago.

Google searches for [Korean Buru Yi] returned pictures of ladies pulling up their shirts with the caption "Nest of bear cubs Korean Buru Yi summer fashion", so it is not all bad. I have never before heard them referred to as "a nest of bears", which is a delightful variation from the American "puppies". Amazon offers an undergarment (visit that link at your own risk: it looks more like a posing pouch to me) described as 'C-IN2 Zen Slider 3161-100111 XL/Winter Wheat'—the item is advertised as offering "support and definition", which would be necessary because inscrutably it is made from bamboo, a plant that grows year round in the tropics. I have never heard it called a Zen Slider, either.

I am now going for a short lie down until the intense electrical activity in my brain subsides.

 

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