People who process welfare applications sometimes come across comical mistakes in English usage made by the applicants as they struggle with the paperwork. The funny language slips may be recounted, and the applications passed around. Such blunders may even be gathered onto a list that is posted in the office.
More often, though, the supposed list of grammatical “mistakes” found on the office bulletin board has been compiled not from actual applications to that office, but merely from another list, which in turn was taken from another list… and so on. Where these lists began, nobody really knows, and they constitute a popular genre of modern written
folklore.
Advice columnist Abigail Van Buren headed her column on July 27, 1987, with one such list, a collection of eleven examples of “how some people murder the English language.” Sent by an eighty-year-old woman in Far Rockaway, New York, the examples were said to be quoted verbatim from the local welfare office.
Several of the blunders contained double-entendres. “I am very annoyed to find that you brand my son illiterate,” read one example from Abby’s column, and continued, “this is a dirty lie, as I was married a week before he was born.”
Another read, “My husband got his project cut off two weeks ago, and I haven’t had any relief since.”
A third read, “I have no children as yet as my husband is a truck driver and works day and night.”
Dear Abby called the errors “a delightful day-brightener.”
I call them an urban legend. Virtually the same
list—sometimes with seventeen or eighteen items—has been around for at least fifty years. No one has ever proved that any of the silly statements really appeared in welfare applications nor other governmental correspondence files to which they are attributed. Chances are slim that almost exactly the same errors were repeated in welfare applications from separate locations over many years’ time.
For example, the last item in the New York list is “I want my money quick as I can get it. I have been in bed with the doctor for two weeks, and he doesn’t do me any good.” A similar collection published in 1977 in the National Retired Teacher’s Association Journal
and credited to “a small New England village’s social welfare office” includes the same sentence. So do lists I have collected from Montgomery County in Alabama and Salt Lake County in Utah.
Welfare workers most likely circulate the lists out of boredom, perhaps hoping that the lists will help them find whatever humor they can in their real clients’ written expression. In any case, the lists derive their effect from their implications about clients’ low levels of intelligence and education.
Sometimes the lists are entitled “Examples of Unclear Writing,” and one sentence even found its way into a manual of prose style written by a titled Englishman. Sir Ernest Gowers’s 1955 book The Complete Plain Words
, after quoting a real example of bureacratic jargon, cites a supposed response from a citizen: “In accordance with your instructions, I have given birth to twins in the enclosed envelope.” Abby’s list lacked this one, but it is usually present on others.
How far back does “The Welfare Letter” go? Curtis D. MacDougall in his book Hoaxes
(New York: Dover, 1958; reprint of a 1940 book) prints six familiar “howlers” from a list of fifteen that he says were of World War I
origin and attributed then to the War Risk Insurance Bureau. MacDougall traces reprints and variations of the list in publications of 1934 and 1935, some attributing the items to the “Veterans Bureau.”
Dale E. Winn of Salt Lake City provided me with a local example from the 1930s. In 1955, for a talk he gave at a high-school class reunion, he drew on a published source then twenty years old—the Tooele
(Utah) Transcript-Bulletin
for February 1, 1935. Right there on page 1 the paper reported on “Curious Letters to New Deal Agencies,” quoting eighteen of the same examples I have given above, along with this, “You have changed my little boy to a girl. Will it make any difference?”
Besides “The Welfare Letter,” other examples of unclear English that people collect supposedly are quoted from parents’ letters to teachers, such as this one: “Dear school, Pleas exkuse John for being absent on January 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 and 33.” And another, “I had to keep Billie home because she ad to go Christmas shopping because I didn’t know what size she ware.” And just one more, “Ralph was absent yesterday because of a sore trout.” (I’ve had that problem myself!)
Another variation on this theme claims to be culled from auto-accident reports. These errors usually are attributed to the files of specific insurance companies, but they can never be tracked to a source other than claim processors passing them around the office.
It is likely that the lists of errors reflect the kinds of mistakes that people really make on insurance-company forms. But it’s unlikely that even the most beleaguered applicant would write anything as silly as this: “As I reached an intersection, a hedge sprang up obscuring my vision.” Or this: “The pedestrian had no idea which direction to go, so I ran over him.” Or this: “An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car and vanished.”
These and similar goofs even show up in newspaper
stories now and then. In 1979, United Press International sent to newspapers a collection of such statements, supposedly supplied by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Three years later, the same news agency circulated virtually the same list, this time crediting it to the York, Nebraska, Police Department.
One of my city’s local papers (not the one that carries my column) published both these lists, and I took pleasure in pointing out in a letter to the editor that both the paper and UPI had fallen for an urban legend.
One more variation on this modern folk tradition is a list of funny mistakes headed “That’s What You Dictated, Doctor!” These lulus are said to be quoted from doctors’ dictated instructions to nurses: “The pelvic examination will be done later on the floor,” says one. “Chief complaint: Chronic right ear,” says another.
“The Welfare Letter” and its kin in this murdering-the-language tradition reflect our impatience with lengthy and bureacratic jargon, and our insecurity about our own use of English. In a way, all the lists are variations on the remark that English teachers encounter all too often: “Since you teach English, I guess I’d better watch my language.”