SOUNDS LIKE STUPIDITY

It has definitely been a while since I've ranted, but not for any lack of material. I find that these things hit me when I'm nowhere near a computer, so I have no way to record my thoughts, and my memory being what it is, they're soon lost. What a shame.

Here's a short one I had pointed out from a friend. It's from a post on a web board, which is a treasure-trove when you are looking for the mistakes of today's youth. At least, I hope it's our youth.

The context isn't important, I believe, so I'll just snip out the really relevant parts.


Nats is confused and melon calling and self-degrading and self-pittying....this is not "evil",

"Evil" would vomit at all the wishy washyness of Nats and Aribeth.

And Aribeth is Psycho in addition to confused and melon calling and self-degrading and self-pitying, and not "evil".


Hopefully your brain paused momentarily, if not longer, on the "melon calling".

Now, working with the context, that all the other terms are adjectives and not verbs (Nats and Aribeth aren't calling out to melons), then what could the author possibly mean? Is melon a misspelled word? Is this slang, with "melon" meaning "head", so "melon calling" is ... insulting someone's head? No no, we ruled out a verb.

Melon calling. Melon calling. It rolls off your tongue, doesn't it? Try it. I promise it'll help. Melon calling. Are you melon calling?

If you haven't gotten it yet - I read it many times before I figured it out - I won't spoil it for you. But this is an extreme example of what I've talked about before, where people are hearing words but never seeing them, and thus are «mapping» them into words that they do know. They get a sense of the meaning of the «word» they've learned, and don't give any thought to how their interpretation could possibly make any sense. Melon calling? Why? Why would you ever believe that that's right? The whole "should of"/"could of"/"would of" issue can be glossed over in print and most readers don't notice it. That doesn't make it right, but at least communication hasn't broken down. But "melon calling"?

I like to think of myself as "hep" and "able", so I can keep up with today's argot. But this? It took me way too long. And the other posters on the message board didn't bat an eye. Was it because they glossed over the unknown and just took in what they could understand? Or was I the only reader on that board that didn't automatically know what the poster meant? Am I that out of touch? Have I fallen behind?

Now I'm feeling a little melon calling myself.