Flips of the Tongue, 2023

It's time for Flips of the Tongue 2023. I was blissfully unaware for a long time that many of my favorite flips may result from voice recognition problems. That deflates my enjoyment of some of these mistakes, but they're still funny.

We’re glazing over the fact: This was in a graphic, so it wasn't just a quick typo during a comment.

Low-lying fruit: A misspeaking, heard in a meeting.

Expend the court! A social media comment about a solution to the Supreme Court and its biases.

Trump really meant to put Pence in front of a lunch mob: Is this Twitter comment a typo? Maybe.

Cameo jacket: This one is just so... stupid. And get this — when I searched the phrase "cameo jacket" in quotes to see what images turned up, I got lots of photos of camouflage jackets. Which I think means the images have been tagged with "cameo jacket" because it's searched so often that people selling camouflage jackets know the should tag their products with it.

I went over bored and bought a tree poney: This person really cannot spell. But they're not the only person who thinks "peony" is "poney,"

I didn’t cow toe to my husband: Did a native English speaker write this? Is it a voice recognition problem? I'm enjoying the image of a cow's toes.

The lessor of two evils: This was urbanist Brent Toderian on Twitter. I'm still wondering if this is a thinko or a voice-recognition problem, though "lesser" is a much more common word than "lessor."

Turning up with starling regularity: This was written by singer-songwriter Billy Bragg in a social media post. It seems like it was a typo, but "starling regularity" is a great phrase all of its own.

I like the cuff of his jib: This one, from Twitter, seems like a true, mistaken notion of the idiom, not a transcription error.

Bottoms up: I heard this on the NPR show "1A." It was said by an expert guest who more than once confidently used the term "bottoms up" to describe a social phenomenon, when what she meant was "bottom-up" (as in, the opposite of "top-down").

Bowing the knee: Charlie Sykes on MSNBC was combining "bending the knee" and "bowing down."

Knock-off effects: Ayman Mohyeldin on MSNBC was confused about knock-offs, thinking they're a type of effect, as opposed to knock-on effects.

Parisian hack service: A Facebook typo (or maybe autocorrect) that was intended to describe the partisan, hack service of police who arrested a journalist in East Palestine and dispersed anti-DeSantis protesters in Florida.

Jump through loopholes: A misspeaking, heard in person.

Both sides of the isle: Seen on Twitter, so possibly it was a typo or transcription error, but it's another funny image.

Gotten under his craw: Michael Steele on MSNBC, mistakenly combining "gotten under his skin" with "caught in his craw."