Classic Clangers

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Classic Clangers

One of the big surprises coming from researching Funny English Errors and Insights is that many of the howlers in modern compilations are actually quite old.

Many of the oft-repeated howlers seem to trace back to an annual competition run by London University in the late 1800s and early 1900s for a magazine called The University Correspondent.

Every year, starting 1892, The University Correspondent would call for the best examination howlers and award a prize to the best submission, usually One Guinea.

We have tracked down the relevant issues of The University Correspondent and we have reproduced some of the less familiar howlers from the magazine, categorised under the decades in which the magazine published the howlers:

1930s: 1930-1932; 1933-1935; 1936-1939

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