Okay, boys: A boner is a mistake. Sure, giggle. You enjoy it. But you might want to save some of that laughter for some of the great, written boners of the high tech writing field.
The most famous written mistake is telling someone to store information on their computer’s hard dick drive. (Honestly, I have trouble writing hard dick because my fingers always want to write hard disk instead. I suppose I’ll never fulfill my dreams of writing porn . . .)
I remember way back, early in my writing career. It was standard procedure back then (in WordPerfect for DOS) to do a search through a document specifically looking for the word dick when I meant to write disk. A cursory Google search shows 19,000 web pages with the text hard dick drive, though many of them are funny on purpose.
It’s also fun to play with the word widow instead of window. For example:
One of the most frustrating things to deal with is when a widow has slid off the screen.
Or:
If you’re not using it, you can minimize the widow to a small button.
Granted, the window/widow swap doesn’t show the humor potential for one of my most famous gaffes:
To continue, lick the button on the computer’s monitor.
Hmmm. That button tastes like cherry!
Did these, perchance, make them into the appropriate books?
And I always thought good buttons tasted like chocolate, and bad buttons tasted like my mother’s casserole (i.e. like rubbish)?
Comment by Douglas — May 30, 2008 @ 2:28 am
I believe “hard dick drive” made it into one of my earlier, ghost-written computer books. Many of the early books had “widow” instead of “window.” And “lick the button” made it into a few books.
The cool thing is that readers caught them and enjoyed writing me back to tell about the errors. So everything was fixed by the 2nd or 3rd printing. But long-term I haven’t seen any good boners like these in a few years in any of the books.
Comment by admin — May 30, 2008 @ 6:24 am