I read something in the Oregonian a while back about this thing called mondegreens. A mondegreen is when a person hears the words in a song wrong. For example, there is a song with the phrase "obstacles in my way." For years I thought the singer was saying "icicles in my tray." That's what a mondegreen is. I was wondering though if there is a word or phrase to use when a person reads a word or acronym wrong.

When my daughter Claire was in the third grade she came home with her lunch menu that the school prints up every month. I hung it on the bulletin board by our phone. While talking to my sister one day on the phone, I noticed a day on the calendar marked "MILK DAY/NO SCHOOL." I incredulously told my sister, "Can you believe it? The schools have a milk day now. What do they do anyway — keep the kids home from school so they can inventory the milk?" I couldn't believe it. My sister and I went back and forth for a while about how the schools will do anything to get a day off blah, blah, blah.

A few days later I explained to Claire that she wouldn't be having school the next day because it was Milk Day. Claire looked, puzzled. I pointed to the place on the calendar where it said MILK DAY/NO SCHOOL. "See," I said derisively, "the school needs to count how much milk it has."

Claire threw back her head and rolled her eyes. "Mom," she said in a voice little girls use only with their very stupid mothers, "that doesn't say MILK DAY, it says M-L-K DAY. Martin Luther King Day." I peered at the calendar. It indeed said MLK DAY.

"Oh," I told Claire. "Never mind."

— Keli Stafford

<—   b  a  c  k

moocat.net © 2001-2010, by . Individual authors retain copyright over their works. Reproduce only with author's permission.