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Continuing the theme of incongruous word substitutions, Don Wilkes and Peter Weinrich both noted one in their local paper, The Saanich News, for 13 September 2006. It turned up in a piece about melting permafrost leaking methane: “It means that if the permafrost front continues to recede, the amount of greenhouse gas pumped into the atmosphere will be greatly exasperated.” * Sometimes homonymic errors lead to incongruous images. Susan Klee found one in a letter to the Wall Street Journal of 8 September, concerning historical dust-ups at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire: “Once, rowdy students discharged the college canon into the walls of Dartmouth Hall.” * A letter in this week’s New Scientist shows what can happen when an association of ideas bubbles on to the page from the unconscious mind. The writer says about the controlled use of drugs in sport, “It is naive to suppose that athletes will be content with a level playing field.”

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