What do you do with those people who correct everybody?

Let me start with a confession: I am what is so unceremoniously referred to in American English as a "word nerd".

And in my case it's a form of neurosis akin to obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, whose Wikipedia definition begins with "a condition characterized by excessive concern with orderliness, perfectionism, attention to detail".

So it's no wonder I became a copy editor.

What's that, you ask?

The term copy editor－or sub editor, as my British and Australian workmates call it－was once whimsically defined by a Washington Post journalist as someone whose job is to review texts and change every "that" to "which" and every "which" to "that".

Copy editors wince about poor grammar and word choice. They identify and correct bad style in writing, what is missing, what is redundant, and when a writer strays beyond fairness or, worse yet, stumbles onto terrain that might bring a letter from a lawyer demanding a published retraction.

Many copy editors have staggeringly voluminous knowledge of arcane bits of information.

One might immediately tell you from memory that, no, cerium is not number 57, but 58 on the Periodic Table of Elements.

Another might pounce on an error about who played third base for the losing team in the 1919 World Series, and fill in his batting average to boot.

But the truest source of all copy editors' kinship lies in the connoisseur's delight they take in language gone wrong, as long as it's not in their own publication.

A goldmine of amusement is the questionable headlines written by overly hurried copy editors themselves. We've all come up with some we'd prefer to forget. Here are a few that were published in English-language newspapers－and, no, they're not mine:

・ State population to double by 2040; babies to blame

・ Stolen prosthetic arm discovered in a secondhand shop

But my favorite source of language gone wrong involves the spoken rather than printed word. I'm thrilled, for example, by the collections of things reportedly said by The Reverend William Archibald Spooner, a preacher and longtime lecturer at New College, Oxford University, who died in 1930.

Spooner is so closely associated with a particular sort of misspeaking－though some might argue it's more a spontaneous and involuntary acuity for brilliancies－that has become known as the spoonerism.

Spoonerisms transpose and juxtapose parts of words in sentences in ways that change meaning. Saying, for instance, "shake a tower" instead of "take a shower".

But Spooner raised the device to an unintended comic art form. He is reported to have said:

・ in a speech to Queen Victoria, "I have in my bosom a half-warmed fish" (half-formed wish);

・ in a sermon, "The Lord is a shoving leopard" (a loving shepherd);

・ at a wedding, "It is kisstomary to cuss the bride" (customary to kiss);

・ to a student, "You have tasted a whole worm" (wasted a whole term);

・ and to a churchgoer, "Mardon me padam, you are occupewing my pie. May I sew you another sheet?" (piece that one together).

In the United States, baseball player Yogi Berra was known for saying seemingly reasonable things that defied themselves with an antilogical twist. Here are a few of his pearls of presumably unintentional wit:

・"Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours."

・"No one goes there nowadays, it's too crowded."

・"You better cut the pizza in four pieces, because I'm not hungry enough to eat six."

It's not that such things never come up in the written word. They do. But unlike writers, speakers don't have copy editors.