I've been pondering on the failure of words to convey what you intend. Partly it's because I'm ditching a big chunk of the beginning of my current book, and starting again from scratch. Partly it's because a friend is currently ill, and a group of us sent her flowers and a simple message. Or so we thought.
Today she wrote to us and, to her thanks, added this:
Card read ‘think of this as super placement’. Now, I had enough functioning brain cells to realise something had been lost in translation, but what? 3am it struck me – super placement, soup replacement.
It gave us all a giggle, and I was reminded of some other failures of the "Chinese whispers" variety -- you know the old game, where one person passes on a whispered message, and they pass it on... and by the time you get to the end of the line the message bears no resemblance to the original.
These are of the cake decorating variety -- cakes ordered over the phone, and then... words fail. Or maybe ears fail.
I love this one, picturing the bride and groom (clearly keen gardeners) in green... and not a drop of green icing in sight.
But I don't think this was what was ordered, either.
And you know exactly what was ordered here:
Anyway, these gave me a laugh, and put me in a better frame of mind for restarting the book. There are plenty more of these cake disasters on the web — just google cake wrecks.
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