A History of Blunders Books

Funny English Errors and Insights is not the first compilation of blunders, and it will not be the last. To put the book in its historical context, this article outlines the history of blunders books.

Scope

To outline the history of blunders books, we must first clarify what we mean by "blunder". The Oxford English Dictionary defines "blunder" as "a gross mistake; an error due to stupidity or carelessness." Such blunders come in various kinds. There are blunders of action, blunders of speech, and blunders of writing.¹ These kinds of blunders can be divided further.

For example, some blunders are "bulls", a kind of blunder involving an unperceived inconsistency. Bulls, which we explore more fully in a separate article, are sometimes associated particularly with the Irish (as in "Irish Bull").  Other blunders are "breaks", such as typographical errors and unfortunate phrasing in newspapers. Yet another kind of blunders are "howlers", a term most often applied to humorous or amusing replies to exam and essay questions in school and college. There are several other kinds of blunders, each with different shades of meaning.

Funny English Errors and Insights is a book of writing blunders, including bulls, breaks, and howlers. Early blunders books, before the invention of the printing press, were books of mostly blunders of action and blunders of speech.

Ancient Greece and Earlier

The oldest known compilation of blunders is a Greek compilation called the Philogelos ("laughter-loving"), also called the Asteia or the Facetiae ("amusing or witty remarks or writings").

The Philogelos is sometimes ascribed to a fifth century Alexandrian philosopher named Hierocles.² Twenty-eight of the specimens in the Philogelos were found appended to a tenth century manuscript of Hierocles' work, Commentary on the Golden Words of Pythagoras.³

However, several discoveries in the 1700s and 1800s, which enlarged the collection of specimens in the Philogelos from 28 to more than 200, suggest that the person who wrote the Commentary is not the same person who compiled the Philogelos.⁴ Rather, the person responsible for the Philogelos may have be someone else also called Hierocles who lived in the first century AD. In fact, the Philogelos may be two books in one, made by two different men: the first century Hierocles and a man named Philagrius. The stories contained in the Philogelos may date even further back, possibly to Buddhist writings and even to stories from ancient Egypt.⁵

The Philogelos contains several specimens that might be described as "bulls". These bulls include blunders of action, such as the story of the man who sat before a mirror to see how he looked when asleep;⁶ and of the man who, being told that a raven can live 200 years, bought one to see whether the statement was true.⁷

The bulls in Philogelos also include blunders of speech. An example is the story of the man who declared, after a narrow escape from drowning, "I will never enter the water again until I have learned how to swim".⁸ But perhaps the best of the old Greek blunders of speech is the story of a son who took the body of his dead father to the embalmers. When the son returned to the embalmers to collect the body, there happened to be a number of bodies in the same place. The son was asked if his father had any peculiarity by which his body might be recognised. The son replied: "He had a cough."⁹

The Invention of the Printing Press

Collections of blunders proliferated after the invention of printing.¹⁰ The compilers took their material from oral as well as written sources, including from medieval collections of "exampla".¹¹ The exempla are moral anecdotes, real or fictitious, used by medieval preachers to illustrate a point.¹²

In the 1600s, there was a rapid increase in so-called jest books.  These jest books include:

• Robert Chamberlain, The Booke of Bulls, Baited with Two Centuries of Bold Jests, and Nimble Lies, or A Combat Between Sence and Non-Sence, Being at Strife who Shall Infuse Most Myrth into the Gentle-Reader (1636)
• Robert Chamberlain, A New Booke of Mistakes, or Bulls with Tales, and Bulls Without Tales But No Lyes By Any Meanes (1637)
• Anonymous, The Complaisant Companion, or New Jests, Witty Reparties, Bulls, Rhodomontado's, and Pleasant Novels (1674)
• Anonymous, Bogg-Witicisms, or Dear Joy's Common Places (1682)
• Richard Head, Nugae Venales, of A Complaisant Companion Being New Jests, Domestick and Forreign, Bulls, Rhodomontados, Pleasant Novels and Miscellanies (1686)
• Humphrey Crouch, England's Jests Refin'd and Improv'd Being a Choice Collection of the Merriest Jests, Smartest Repartees, Wittiest Sayings, and Most Notable Bulls (1687)
• J Wilde, England's Merry Jester (1693)

These jest books contain a large proportion of blunder-stories. For example, Robert Chamberlain's Booke of Bulls (1636) tells the story of a man who said he had seen a unicorn with two horns;¹³ a man who bragged that his master could kill an ox and a half each day;¹⁴ and the man who accused another man of stealing pears from his plum tree.¹⁵

The Great Depression

The word "howler", in the sense of humorous answers to exam questions, dates to the late nineteenth century.¹⁶ There were a few compilations of howlers around this time, though the word "howler" is not used in some of them. One of the best compilation of howlers of the time is English As She Is Taught (1887), compiled by Caroline B Le Row. But the golden era of howlers books was the late 1920s and early 1930s, especially the period around the Great Depression.

In 1931, Viking Press published Boners, compiled by Alexander Abingdon.  "Boners" is the American term for howlers. Boners was a megaselling book. It was the fourth bestselling non-fiction book in the USA for the year 1931.¹⁷ The book went through four printings in just two months.¹⁸ Boners was so successful that three more volumes were rushed to publication in 1931. These sequels, especially More Boners, were also very successful. Boners continued to sell well for decades. It was reprinted in 1997 and again in 2007. Boners is also significant because it launched the career of Dr Seuss, who illustrated Boners and More Boners. Dr Seuss would go on to become the best-selling children's author of all time.

About the same time, in August 1928, the prolific compiler of howlers, Cecil Hunt (1902-1954), published Howlers through his British employer-publisher Ernest Benn.  Hunt had been jotting down howlers for years, filling exercise books with examples.¹⁹ Like Boners, Howlers was an immediate bestseller. It sold 10,000 copies even before publication and more than 9000 in just one week, the week before Christmas 1928.²⁰ A second collection of howlers, Fresh Howlers (1930), was as popular as the first collection.²¹ There then followed 10 more books of howlers by Hunt (see our bibliography for a complete list). Some of Hunt's Howlers books of the 1930s were reissued as late as the 1960s. In 1985, Russell Ash published a book of howlers (also called Howlers) based on Hunt's earlier Howlers books.

Boners in the USA and Howlers in Britain were the progenitors of many successful similar books. School-hood memories of both Boners and Howlers, alongside Art Linkletter's Kids Sure Rite Funny (1962), were part of the inspiration for our own compilation of Funny English Errors and Insights in 2010.

Modern Compilers

Of modern compilers of blunders, we mention three of the most prolific. The first is Denys Parsons. Denys Parsons was "the undisputed king of the misprint".²² Over several decades, he compiled many best-selling volumes, including It Must Be True (1952), Can It Be True? (1953), and Many a True Word (1958). Parsons' books bring together breaks from the English-speaking daily press, including typographical accidents and other editorial clangers. His books have been reissued several times, including several reissues in the 1980s. A collection of  press breaks from Parsons' books was published in 2002, borrowing the title It Must Be True.

If Parsons was king of the misprint, then Juliet Lowell was the queen of unintentionally humorous letters. From the 1940s to the 1960s, Lowell compiled and published unintentionally humorous letters written from and to people in all walks of life. Her compilations include Dear Sir (1944), Dear Sir or Madam (1946), Dear Doctor (1955), Dear Justice (1958), Dear Hollywood (1959), Dear Mr Congressman (1960), Dear Folks (1960), Dear Man of Affairs (1961), Dear VIP (1963), and Dear Candidate (1968).

The reigning clown prince of English language blunders is Richard Lederer, an American author and speaker. Lederer has more than a million books in print,²³ including, most notably, his best-selling Anguished English series. According to Lederer's website, Anguished English (1987) is the largest selling language bloopers book ever.²⁴ Lederer has compiled several successful sequels, including More Anguished English (1993), Fractured English (1996), The Bride of Anguished English (2000), and The Revenge of Anguished English (2005).

Conclusion

Even from just this brief history of blunders books, we can draw some conclusions and pose some interesting questions. The humour of blunders — of other people's blunders — has a long history. Many peoples in many places have enjoyed the unconscious humour of blunders. Perhaps human nature is much the same in all times and in all places?

If we look deeper into some of the books mentioned above, we see that some of the blunder stories collected through the centuries are so similar that they may trace to a common origin; perhaps some of the blunders have been modified or updated to make the stories more relevant to contemporary audiences?

Thinking even more deeply about the specimens in some of the modern collections of blunders compared to early examples, has the form in which the blunder stories are told changed somewhat? Are modern blunders books expected to contain shorter specimens that can be read more quickly by a busier and less patient consumer? Was a moral to the blunder stories more important in the past than today?

It can be more certainly stated that blunders books have been hugely popular. They have topped the bestseller lists despite, or perhaps because of, hard times — including the hard economic times of the Great Depression. The blunders books may be regarded as the most persistent of all book forms. We are proud that the latest addition to the genre, our own Funny English Errors and Insights, can join such illustrious company.