After They Were Kidnaped... They Were Rapped!
I found this hilarious old 78rpm record on Second Avenue yesterday. It's "an adventure story in sound"...and in bad spelling, too! Yes, misprinted on the cover is the title of R L Stevenson's piratical thriller, 'Kidnaped'! The spelling of the title is correct on the back of the record sleeve:
Whoever approved the front cover ought to have been made to... Wawk The Plank! Then Slep with the Fisshes!
UPDATE: Today. a so-called friend sought to undermine this post by calling my attention to the fact that Dictionary.com's definition of kidnap allows both of the above spellings for the past tense of the verb. But I have no memory of ever seeing kidnaped in print, and another web site, Future-Perfect, notes that a few verbs in English require one to double the last letter when spelling the past participle:
‘worship’, ‘handicap’ and ‘kidnap’ become ‘worshipping/worshipped’, ‘handicapping/handicapped’ and ‘kidnapping/kidnapped’ in standard received British English.
posted by Stephen at November 12, 2013
