Eels with a conscience
Yesterday on BBC News I read the story of a man who was abandoned and adopted as a baby and is now trying to find out what exactly happened. (One of the strangest things is that when the police arrived at the block of flats where he’d been found, several people were standing around him on the cold concrete floor and nobody had picked him up.)
A sentence struck my eye: “The social morays at the time looked down on unmarried mothers.” …morays? Aren’t those the eels with all the teeth?
When you swim in the sea
and an eel bites your knee,
that’s a moray.
But then these are social morays, so probably apt to be more judgmental.
They’ve changed it now, of course, rather a pity. But how could it have happened? I don’t suspect the spell checker (check: mine knows both ‘mores’ and ‘morays’). Either someone didn’t know how to spell ‘mores’ or, more likely and more hilarious, someone used dictation software, pronounced it correctly, and the program picked the wrong homophone.
Posted: 06-Nov-2009 | /words/reading | link | 0 comments



