Dr. Metablog

"Hurrah for the Pumpkin Pie"

Another Thanksgiving come and gone, and here am I in a nostalgic mood, harking back to those songs that we sang in the PS 217 "assembly" in the 40s and 50s of the last millennium. With Miss Georgia Keiselbach at the piano, we marched, in size places, decorated in white shirts and green ties, into the school auditorium and warbled our dear little hearts out every Thursday at 10:00 am.

I remember very well the stirring but perplexing Thanksgiving hymn that began 

We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.

Looking backward, I admit that I understood the first line of the stanza but was pretty much boggled by what came next. "Chasten" and "hasten" make a wonderful internal rhyme, but who does He hasten and how exactly does He chasten?  A syntactical mystery for sure. Were we expected to believe that the Great Signifier in the Sky "chastens and hastens" His own will?  Why in the world should he be asked to do so?

Nor did I grasp the meaning of third line, because I didn't recognize that "the wicked oppressing" meant "the oppressing wicked" or more precisely "the wicked who are oppressing someone." But who were they "oppressing"? Apparently, the "distressing", that is, the people who are distressed. And who, to be more specific, were the innocent distressed who were being oppressed. Us?  Our teachers? Let me now confess that I sang then and remember at this moment the line as "now cease us from distressing", thinking that we, the pupils, must have been the "wicked" and that it was our now enlightened task to cease from oppressing the distressed. I read the line as a provocation to guilt, even though I knew that I myself, third-grader, had never oppressed anyone.

Nor was I the only confused 10-year-old, because BB, my PS 217 classmate and consultant on our assemblies, remembered the line as "The wicked oppressing now seize us from distressing" -- a sentence which is way beyond my parsing skills.

Of the last line of the quatrain, I grasped "Sing praises to his name" but "He forgets not His own" opened another can of confused worms. I construed "His own" to be shorthand for "his own name." But what kind of Lord forgets his own name?  As BB, equally misled, says, 'it's god, just three letters; how hard is that?"

The hymn goes on for another four puzzling stanzas, though to tell truth, I don't remember whether they were required of us PS 217 choristers. I for one am retrospectively pleased that we omitted the stanza that included the lines "We praise thee, O God, our Redeemer, Creator,/ In grateful devotion our tribute we bring" which surely seemed even then a trifle too theological. 

Despite the fact that I was mostly clueless, I rather enjoyed belting out the hymn's anapests. It's a joyous, rollicking piece of music. Whether it was appropriate for a public school in the heart of immigrant Brooklyn is another question. But hey, it was the 50s, before we all became so multicultural.

Nevertheless, out of spirit of curiosity, and because it's now so easy even for us lazybones to investigate such questions, I turned once again to wikipedia and typed in "We gather together." Warning: surprise in store.

It's a Christian hymn (of course) written in 1597 by one Adrianus Valerius to celebrate the victory in the Battle of Turnhout, a turning point in the Dutch Protestant war of liberation against Spanish Catholic domination. It first appeared in print in a 1626 collection of Dutch folk and patriotic songs but didn't find its way to the New World until 1903 and became popular only in 1935 when it was included in the "national hymnal of the Methodist-Episcopal Church." During World War II, which was entering its last phase when I was a kindergartner in PS 217, the hymn became popular because "'the wicked oppressing' was understood to refer to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan." Which is, I suppose, how an anti-Catholic Protestant hymn came to be included in our curriculum. After all, it was out of such strange and unpredictable meldings and divagations that Brooklyn/American culture was formed.   

"We gather together" was not our only Thanksgiving song. We also sang the entirely unobjectionable 

          Over the river, and through the wood,

          To Grandmother's house we go;

          The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh

          Through the white and drifted snow - oh.

I found this song lovely but otherworldly, because my own particular grandmother lived not over the river but in a tiny third-floor walk-up on distinctly unpastoral Coney Island Avenue, where there was an occasional tired horse, pulling a vegetable wagon, but there were few sleighs.

But as it turns out, "Over the river" too has a history.  

   

That's a portrait of its author, Lydia Maria Child. She looks rather forbidding, as though she might have taught sixth grade at PS 217, but on further investigation she turns out to have been a radical and revolutionary woman to whose accomplishments I wish we had been introduced. Born in 1802, she started her writing career with the novel Hobomok which depicts and approves of the marriage of an Indian man and a white woman. It caused a small scandal. In 1833, she published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans which proposed the immediate emancipation of slaves, arguing that slavery was as harmful to slave-owners as to the enslaved. It was the first anti-slavery book printed in America. Ms. Child was also an early advocate of women's rights and spoke favorably of sexual passion. Of course she was ostracized from polite society. In 1844, she published the small innocuous poem for which she is remembered, which concludes "Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?/Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!" -- a sentiment to which there can be no possible objection or dissent.

O'Neill, Nebraska

When I was for a decade the caretaker to a very ill, very disabled person, I often attended a "support group" along with folks who found themselves in similar situations. Not an easy task, being a full-time caretaker. At these useful gatherings, Information was exchanged, sympathy was given, hands were wrung and tissues were always at the ready. It was never an easy two hours.  

 

One of the recurrent themes of our discussions was escapism. Many of the caregivers wanted out. "I just want to get into a car and drive somewhere, anywhere."  "I want to lie on a beach in Hawaii, all by myself."  "I want to move to a garret in Paris, stay there until this is over -- somewhere where I could meet new people, healthy ones." "Sometimes I think of joining a pilgrimage, but I don't know to where." "Nepal."  "A cruise around the world." "Is there another planet that I could go to?"

 

I too had escapist fantasies, but I'm embarrassed to report that they were of the blandest, most unimaginative, variety. Not Paris or Rome or Prague. For me, it was decidedly unexotic O'Neill, Nebraska. If any of my constant readers need evidence that I was then and am now a monumentally pedestrian person, the proof lies in the O'Neill pudding. 

 

When I indulged the fantasy, which I did at night, usually between 2am to 4am, I would imagine myself in a room at a slightly louche pay-by-the-week motel a couple of blocks from downtown O'Neill. Crappy old stick furniture (but a good bed and mattress), low-wattage light bulbs in the ceiling fixture, big cut-glass ashtray. In this alternative world, I ate my breakfasts at Fay's Cafe a few hundred yards from the motel -- at my regular booth by the window. In the big table at the center of the diner, cheerful immense farmers gobbled their pancakes and bacon and coffee before setting off to fire up their John Deeres. They talked irrigation pipe and the price of soybeans.  

 

 

O'Neill was so real to me that I could see myself walking the route from my place at the Dakota Motel to the cafe, past St. Mary's church and then by the old bank building.

 

 

 Or strolling on a weekend evening to the old Gateway Theater  to see the latest vampire or biker flick.    

 

 

 

Perhaps stopping at the Chesterfield West for an order of chicken fried steak, fried green beans and mayonnaise.

 

It was a fantasy of Crusoe-like solitude right there in central Nebraska. No conversation, not even a casual "hello."  

 

It was not a dream. Nothing irrational or dreamlike ever occurred. I'm not that sort of person. On the contrary, everything was realer than real. I could feel the texture of the brick buildings as I made my way down the street. The sense were not dulled; they were alerted.

 

In retrospect, it is mighty curious to me that I never imagined such commonplace human interactions as a chat on a bench in the square or a game of poker or pool. No contacts, male or female. I didn't have the strength.

 

The O'Neill of my troubled nights was not a real place. It was an invented composite of the many small mid-western towns in which I had eaten or slept during one of my many cross-country migrations. Yet it was real to me -- and a considerable solace. 

 

I'm happy to report that O'Neill is all over now. Gone.  

Shakespeare Gets Going

Setting aside the suspicion that The First Part of Henry the Sixth is a collaborative work or perhaps even a "prequel" to Parts Two and Three, the play can be read as if its first few lines were the earliest example of Shakespeare's playwriting. If so, then, what can be learned, right there at the very beginning, by looking closely at Act one, scene one, line one? 

Here's the first considerable speech in the play -- just about the very moment, let us imagine, in which Mr. W. S.'s "rough and all-unable" goose quill touched paper. Thirty-seven or thirty-eight astonishing plays lie in the future. 

The adventure begins as Gloucester eulogizes the recently-deceased Henry V. The speech is not brilliant, not accomplished; in fact, it's just plain vanilla ordinary. But it's a seed, a kernel.   

Gloucester:   England ne'er had a king until his time.

Virtue he had, deserving to command:

His brandish'd sword did blind men with his beams:

His arms spread wider that a dragon's wings;

His sparking eyes, replete with wrathful fire

More dazzled and drove back his enemies

Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.

What should I say?  his deeds exceed all speech:

He ne'er lift up his hand but conquered. 

A reader or playgoer would have to be superbly insightful to predict that this Shakespeare would become the Shakespeare. This opening speech is a a mighty flat piece of rhetoric.

It's formulaic  -- simply a litany or list. First comes an item, a noun (virtue, sword, arms, eyes, deeds) which is then amplified by a hyperbolic qualifier (beams, wings, fire, sun). It's open-ended; it could go on indefinitely. But because it's so much a formula, there's no surprise--there's no mystery or excitement about where Gloucester is heading.

Moreover, for each element in the list, there's a congruence between the unit of thought and the unit of verse. The sentiment of each of the first four items on the list is exactly contained in a five-beat, ten-syllable line of verse--a pedestrian procedure which Shakespeare would soon transcend. And finally, there's an excess of old-fashioned, traditional alliteration: "His Brandish'd sward did Blind me with his Beams" "affects the letter" and browbeats the brain with the letter B. It goes almost without saying that there's nothing in this speech that is particular (Elizabethans would say peculiar) to either Gloucester or Henry. This is Anyduke reciting sentences about Anyking.

But then something truly amazing occurs.  Although it looks as though Gloucester is gathering his strength and his breath for a speech that might go on for forty lines and which would celebrate many more of the late kings's amazing attributes, he suddenly changes plans and truncates his intention:  "What should I say?  his deeds exceed all speech."

Gloucester seems to have run out of rhetorical gas. He is frustrated because he simply doesn't have the words. He throws in the rhetorical towel, so to speak. He surrenders. And he's right to do so, because at this early moment neither he nor Shakespeare has the power to generate a language that is equal to Henry's deeds. Better to stop speaking if you are utterly unable to say what you want to say.

Yet what is the task of such a playwright as Shakespeare?

It is not to do exactly what Gloucester admits that he cannot do? -- to find the words that are commensurate with the deed -- as Shakespeare certainly will when he returns to Henry in the 1598 play which concludes and climaxes this sequence of eight history plays. In a decade, Shakespeare will move from the pathos of "What shall I say?" to a rich eloquence that is up to the task.

"What shall I say?" is therefore an important question -- the most important question of all, in fact -- and the playwright asks it right here at the outset. Readers can watch and learn as Shakespeare little by little, in play after play, gradually invents a rhetorical style in which speech not only equals but eventually comes to exceed all deeds.  

A New Fear

When I was a exceedingly young fellow (teens and twenties), I suffered from a great fear of death. It was not obsessive or constant, but enough to keep me lying awake at night, sometimes in a sweaty panic. It was not a fear of death itself, nor a concern about anguish in an afterlife -- hell a story which I always regarded as a pathetic fiction and fraud. No, my fear was that I would miss out on things. Children, grandchildren, springtimes, love, baseball, mountains, travel, books, knowledge, corn and hamburgers in August, the works. I wanted to live to an old age for the experiences. I well remember that in the 1960s, when I was barely out of adolescence, I would project myself forward to the distant future, as far as to the year 2000, the new millennium. I remember thinking, if I can just make it to 2000, when I'll be sixty-one, I'll have lived a full life. I'll be ready to go.

Well, 2000 has long ago come and gone, and here I am, pushing eighty, and in excellent, almost miraculous health. Such good health, in fact, that on good days I climb our neighboring foothills like a gazelle. (On bad days, even walking downhill seems as though I'm slogging through a swamp of mucilage, but that's another matter.)

I no longer fear death. No matter what else happens to me, I'm not going to die young, with my promises, such as they were, unfulfilled.

But the fear of dying young has been superseded by a new fear -- the fear of living too long. When did the transition occur?

I don't want to outlive my time. I don't want to outlive my friends, my family, my health. I'm already the senior member, the patriarch, of my extended family -- not just the direct line from my grandparents, but of the extended cousinhood. In my family, there are no elders and only a couple of near-coevals. I don't want to become an isolate. Even more so, I don't want to lose my mobility or my mind. I don't want to find myself in a nursing home, pee on my pants, bedridden, "locked-in". And I'm going to do everything I can to avoid allowing myself to get into that situation. I've seen people in that trap at close hand too many times -- and it ain't pretty.  

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the perspective of the moment. I'm glad that I managed to get to this point. From where I stand, I can remember my grandparents and I know my grandchildren. I'm at the midpoint, the apex, of five generations. I marvel at the changes -- recall, will you, that my grandfather was born in darkest Ukraine in 1863, my youngest grandchildren were born in hi-tech Boulder, Colorado in 2013. Need I say more?

The Cheese Stands Alone

Certainly in the 1940s and perhaps in later decades, first-graders all over America were taught an "activity" based on a song called "The Farmer in the Dell." Older readers of this blague, if they are courageous enough to delve into long-forgotten and repressed pockets of the past, might dare to summon up the memory. 

Here's the game:  Ten young waifs, divided equally by gender, formed a circle holding hands around the Chosen One who was designated the "farmer." The gamins (and gamines) sang the following song:

The farmer in the dell,

The farmer in the dell.

Heigh-ho the derry-o,

The farmer in the dell.

While they sang, the "farmer" walked around the inside of the circle and chose a partner from the circle of children. Then the tune was repeated with the key word altered:  

The farmer takes a wife,

The farmer takes a wife,

Heigh-ho the derry-o

The farmer takes a wife.

The "wife" then joined him inside the circle, and the plot thickened. Now they sang:   

"The wife takes a child,

The wife takes a child;

Heigh-ho the derry-o

The wife takes a child."

And so on down and down the great chain of being. 

"The child takes a nurse...

"The nurse takes a cow...

"The cow takes a dog...

"The dog takes a cat...

"The cat takes a mouse..."

And finally, when all the players have been chosen but one, the game ended on the following exclusionary note:

"The cheese stands alone.

The cheese stands alone.

Heigh-ho the derry-o,

The cheese stands alone."

What was the point of this weird game? Why was it included in the "curriculum?"  Even seventy years later, it seems to be not fun but gratuitous cruelty. The most popular, the handsomest boy picks the most alluring young lady, and then choices are made in order of status. The game seems to have been devised to reinforce a hierarchical social structure. It was unAmerican, neither democratic or egalitarian. In retrospect, the game was triumphalist with regard to the farmer and his wife and harsh as all get out to the mouse and the cheese. If literary critics were to get their hands on this verse, they would be forced to notice the tragic pattern -- marriage at the outset followed by inevitable decline into isolation and soul-death.

Needless to say, I myself identify not with the prosperous farmer and his vivacious wife, but with the lumpish cheese. Velveeta it probably was, a big shapeless orange block of it, because no fancy aristocratic European cheeses were known to those of us who grew up in the 1940s PS 217 schoolyard. A sad cheese, inanimate, excluded from society, unchosen, least loved. Does the entire history of poetry offer a more mournful note than "the cheese stands alone?" Poor poor pitiful solitary neglected cheese. 

In recompense (it's too late for an apology) let us remember, three quarters of a century later, that cheeses have feelings too.

And for the curious, a "dell" is "a small valley in a forest, tucked away from the rest of civilization." At the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island Avenue, where PS 217 was to be found, there were, trust me, no wooded dells. Concrete sidewalks, chain-link fences, yes. Dells no. Delis, but no dells.     

All You Need to Know about Antres

"Antres" is among the rarest of rare words. Shakespeare's Othello speaks of "antres vast and deserts idle" in the magnificent oration in which he takes issue with the Venetian bigotry that claimed that he was only able to win white Desdemona by employing drugs and witchcraft. No, it wasn't because he was a sorcerer; it was because he was accomplished, heroic, romantic. "Antres" is one of the exotic words that defines the great African general as a non-Venetian -- an outlander, an "erring barbarian," an "extravagant and wheeling stranger."

Shakespeare coined "antres" just for the occasion, deriving it from Latin antrum, a cave. He never used "antres" again, nor did anyone else until Keats fleetingly revived the word two centuries afterward. "Antres" never domesticated into English and remains curious and remote, eternally in need of an explanatory footnote. It is unlikely that Shakespeare expected that a popular or even a courtly audience would grasp "antres" at first hearing. It's a risky word, but Shakespeare didn't become Shakespeare without taking risks.

The playwright coupled the neologism "antres" to another shiny new Latinism to produce "antres vast," a phrase which translates into the language of 2017 as "really big caves." Yet no translation can do justice to the spacious resonance of "antres vast." The caverns to which Othello refers are monstrously huge -- grown grander and even more inaccessible because Shakespeare ingeniously placed the modifier after rather than before the noun. "Antres vast" are a hundredfold more mysterious -- darker, more echoic, more glinty with stalactites and stalagmites -- than "vast antres."  

"Antres vast" occurs in tandem with a second and equally remarkable noun-adjective combination: "deserts idle." Othello reports that before he came to Venice, he had not only traversed "rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven" but had also dwelt among "antres vast and deserts idle." Strictly speaking, deserts cannot be "idle," but they can be vacant or useless. "Deserts idle" reinforces and augments "antres vast." Taken together, the two phrases are infinitely more evocative than either alone.

As a structure of sound, "antres vast and deserts idle" pivots on the "d" of "and" and the "d" of "deserts" and it positions "antres" and "idle" in symmetrical opposition. The two key words are dissimilar yet cleverly interlinked, each comprised of an open vowel (Antres, Idle), a dental (anTres, iDle), and a liquid (antRes, idLe). It is not by accident that "antres vast and deserts idle" is such a euphonious and mouth-filling phrase.      

Shakespeare not only invented "antres" for Othello's oration but also took care to surround it with other linguistic novelties. For example: Othello claims to have encountered "cannibals that each other eat/ The anthropophagi." "Cannibal" is now a commonplace noun, but in 1604 it was a newcomer to the language. "Cannibal" derives from "Carib," the name of a recently-encountered people--reputed to be man-eaters --who gave their appellation to the sea in which they lived. "Cannibal" was sufficiently strange--it had only made harbor in England (arriving by way of Spain) in the 1550s--that Shakespeare felt a need to define it, which he did once in English ("that each other eat") and once in Greek ("anthropophagi"). "Anthropophagi," a word that had originated with Herodotus, was as new to English--and as seldom employed--as "cannibal."   

"Antres vast," "deserts idle," "cannibals" and "anthropophagi" play crucial parts in Othello's stirring autobiographical fragment.           

         I spake of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Of hair-breadth scapes i'th'imminent deadly breach,

Of being taken by the insolent foe

And sold to slavery;  of my redemption thence,

And portance in my travel's history:

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,

It was my hint to speak -- such was the process.

And of the cannibals that each other eat,

The anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

It's an astonishing story, each element more incredible than the one that precedes it. Hair-breadth escapes?  Every hero can boast of them. Redemption from slavery? A bit less likely. Hills whose heads touch heaven? A pardonable hyperbole. Cannibals?  Surely, less believable still. The Othello landscape then crosses the border from exotic to fabulous when it adduces "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders." These headless men are the blemmyae -- Nubian or sometimes Ethiopian -- who were a feature of  pseudo-anthropological folklore from Pliny to Sir Walter Raleigh. The skepticism that these monstrous creatures ought to provoke is diluted because the road to the blemmyes passes through "antres vast and deserts idle." If audiences had not been lulled and seduced by "antres," they might dismiss Othello as a mere braggart soldier--rather than admire him for the near-magician that he becomes in his self-dramatization.   

Shakespeare had yet another purpose for "antres vast." In the sentence that treads on the heels of the "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders," Othello abruptly turned his attention to Desdemona. His language dulls. "This (i.e. his exotic narrative) to hear would Desdemona seriously incline,/ But still the house affairs would draw her hence." Shakespeare strategically contrasts Othello's vocabulary to Desdemona's when he juxtaposes "antres vast" to "house affairs." Only the tinnest of ears can fail to be struck by the difference between the two phrases. Antres vast--house affairs; house affairs--antres vast. The gap between these two most pregnant phrases is small enough to allow the electric impulses of sex and romance to spark, but is too wide to allow genuine understanding or empathy to shoot the gap. The tragedy of Desdemona and Othello arises out of the unbridgeable space between "antres vast" and "house affairs."

Shakespeare therefore knew exactly what he was about when he invented the word "antres."

If he had been in a more antic mood, less determined to characterize Othello's massive dignity, he might have coined a word from another Latin word for cave, e.g. spelunca.  But "spelunkies vast" -- or even "spelunkies splendid" -- could not possibly do the work of "antres vast." 

A "Word Problem"

If one 4 1/2 year old grandson can launch five foot stream of urine from where he stands to the base of a tree, how many 80-year-old grandfathers would it take to equal the performance?

Some answers:  a) 20 (tag team line of grampas each contributing 4").  b) does it count if I hurl my Depends?  c) I know the answer but I forgot. 

Do the Dodgers Have an Outfielder Named Bacchus Pederson?

Judging from his spectacularly wonderful name you might guess that Bacchus Pederson is either a character in a novel by Thomas Pynchon or the son of a Swedish father and a patriotic Greek mother. Not so. He's the creation not of eccentric parents or postmodern fiction the but of the voice recognition system that's been close-captioning that 2017 Dodgers-Astros World Series. He's an imaginary being. He does not exist. Except on the TV screen.

There is, however, a up-and-coming not-Greek-but-Jewish on-his-mother's-side left hand hitting center fielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Joc Pederson. And what is the relationship between Joc and Bacchus, you ask?

The other day (and the following morning because the game went on roughly forever), I watched the epic 13-12 Houston win over the Dodgers. A most exciting game. There was bad umpiring by the home plate official, there were balls flying out of the bandbox and onto the short porches, there was some beautiful defensive plays and some costly mental errors. See-saw, back and forth.

And yet more. Inasmuch as my veteran ears are past their prime and over the hill, I now supplement my hearing with "close captioning." I try to catch what Joe Buck and John Smoltz say and then watch as their words, or some approximation of their words, flashes across the screen. It's an activity that is almost as fascinating and much more amusing than the game itself. And it is out of this experience that the fanciful mythological figure of Bacchus Pederson emerges. Smoltz says "a fly ball to center and back goes Pederson." CC writes "a fly ball to center and Bacchus Pederson." No human being would translate "back goes" into "Bacchus". It's nonsensical and not even decent English grammar. t's got to be a machine, an idiot savant machine, that, stumped by "back goes," has located "Bacchus" in its word hoard. 

And similarly, what is an "Amana board?"  Something wooden manufactured in the Amana colonies in Iowa, you might guess. No, it's CC for "a man aboard." 

CC produces all sorts of comic linguistic wonders because it's utterly untethered to common sense. 

When John Smoltz, a human being who knows all there is to know about pitching, said that the left-hander was going to try to "bury it in the back foot," knowledgeable baseball fans would understand exactly what was meant. The lefty intended to throw an unhittable pitch by coming as close as possible to the left-handed batter's left foot. However, readers would have to be mighty clever to interpret the meaningless wild CC phrase "Marriott in the back foot."  

Other electronic locutions were easier. Not much of problem with "hit it into the upper tank" or "rubbing him of a double" or "sacrifice bump" or "Taylor will eat it off."

Some CC flights of fancy require a little more interpretive skill. Will the Dodger manager replace his pitcher with "a fresher god?" Perhaps a "fresher guy." Did the pitching staff "hand out seven rocks?" Seven walks is more likely. Do the Dodgers have a right fielder named Yossi el Pogue?  No, but they do have Yasiel Puig. Was a reliever taken out after "a short student?" Naw, it was a short stint. Did a pitch come "in her half" of the plate?  Who is "her"?  But no, it was "inner half." Is it possible that a batter "applied to center?"  No but he might very well have "flied to center."

Here's one that is Impossible to comprehend: "Turner headset hard." I had to rewind and listen again: "Turner hits it hard." 

Sometimes CC sounds vaguely spiritual. "Flies want to center," says CC. Do they really, I ask. But what Joe Buck said was "flies one to center." 

My favorites, aside from the immortal Bacchus Pederson, are errors that make no sense at all. What does it mean to say that a pitcher is a "shortest writer." And that he "threw his lighter."  The correct locutions: he was a "short strider" who "threw his slider." 

Voice recognition systems are technological marvels, no doubt. But they have a way to go. There's still a place at the table for humans.