In which yer fav-o-rite blahgger learns that “misle” is an actual THING

Remember these people? I certainly do. I took the pic with my Sony Mavica 👀 so y’all know how long ago it was. These people are having their weekly Cabin Garbage Argument but we’ll get to that a bit later.

What I want to talk about today is the time The Commander was reading a newspaper article to Grandroobly and she kept saying someone was “misled”, except she was pronouncing the past tense of “mislead” with a long i vowel sound. Eventually she figured out her mistake but of course hilarity ensued and if you knew these people you might know that they continued to mispronounce “misled” on purpose.

I follow @GrammarGirl on Twitter and I clicked over to her site yesterday when she was talking about “Biopic”, which I’ve been wondering how to pronounce. And then. The article called this kind of mispronunciation a “misle” and I thought something like, “Could it be?” Yes, yes, it was. Here’s a snippet from the article:

What’s a misle, you ask? It’s a mispronunciation of a word based on its spelling. It gets its name from the past tense of the verb misLEAD. The word misLED can be misREAD as /ˈmaɪzəld/. People who read it this way might go for years before they realize that misle-d and mis-led are the same word—the same way that it took me to realize that Tuck-son and Tucson, Arizona were the same place. Other misles include infrare-d for infrared, and warp-lanes for warplanes.

The Commander would have loved this article.

Oh yeah, Garbage Theatre. Back then, the main option for dealing with Cabin Garbage was to stuff it all into *one* garbage can, put that garbage can into the back of the car and drive it up the gravel two-track to the top of the hill for WM to pick it up. Every single dad-blasted week, they had the same arguments. They are actually “acting” in this pic, which is one of a series.

I wonder if my folks would’ve adapted to Green Bag Garbage. After The Commander died, I didn’t want to deal with WM any more. If we are up there for a long weekend, we can take the garbage home. When we are there for a few weeks, we certainly cannot but I’m not sure WM would want to contract with us for that short period of time.

Nowadays thanks to a tip from our dual peninsula friends of porterization we have switched to GREEN BAGS! They are the same size as regular garbage bags but they are light green. We buy them at the Bay Mart gas station for something like $1.50 a piece. We drop off our filled bags at the Bay Mills Indian Community, across from the Kings Casino and just down the road from the Dancing Crane Coffeehouse. So you can drop off your garbage whenever you want (Tues-Sat, 10-6). I’m not sure why other seasonal moominbeach residents don’t do this.

If Green Bags had been around back then, I may have engineered an End Run around my parents, buying Green Bags and dropping them off without their knowledge. They wouldda been wondering something like, “What happened to the garbage?” “Did somebody steal it?” “Is it in the swamp?”

2 Responses to “In which yer fav-o-rite blahgger learns that “misle” is an actual THING”

  1. Margaret Says:

    As a language person, I was/am intrigued by that article. I read a lot, but don’t hear words pronounced, so my vocabulary is excellent, but my pronunciation not so much. When I was a child, I said “Chile” for the country, instead of Chee lay. I remember my dad laughing! Are those green bags the compostable ones? We had to have them for Ashley’s wedding because Seattle is strict about compostable/recycle etc.

  2. Pooh Says:

    I’ve had several words that I read before I heard, and therefore mispronounced. Par-a-dig-em for example, although that one I heard first, and wrote down in my college notes as paradyme, then finally read it. I’ve seen semi trucks where the back end was stenciled across the back doors with KING’S WAY. The spacing and the door split line made it read more like KING SWAY, which made me cautious to pass it.