Howlers: My Biggest Blogging Fear

Once, when looking up something else, I randomly opened my Handbook to Literature and an entry caught my eye: Howler. The first line of the explanation of a howler is as follows: “A small error that begins in innocence or ignorance and ends in folly and potential embarrassment.” It was not terribly illuminating, but I read on. Basically, a howler is a word or a phrase that is misused by the author because they didn’t know any better.

A friend of mine once posted on her MySpace page that she took her family for granite sometimes. At the time I didn’t know what a howler was, but I knew that granted, not granite, was the way the phrase was meant to be completed. My friend fixed the mistake, and months later I learned that she was in the company of Whitman, Browning, and Hardy, who were all used to demonstrate the meaning of howler in Harmon’s Handbook.

Daily Howler, a blog included on our very own site’s blogroll, defines a howler as a stupid and ridiculous logical blunder. I don’t want to make one of those either.

It’s nice to know that some big names in literature have made some embarrassing mistakes. It puts any mistakes I might make on my blog in perspective. But, if I can get through the semester without a howler, I’ll be ecstatic.