What happens when newspaper layout goes wrong

"A policy on wedgies and engagements?" I thought to myself. "That can't be right."

Wondering if I somehow had been reduced to a character in Dav Pilkey's "Captain Underpants" series, I did a quick double-take and found the questionable headline. Sure enough, it wasn't right. The headline, hanging on one of the desks at the newspaper's composition office, didn't refer to wedgies at all. The offending word was "weddings."

With song lyrics, this sort of goof is called a mondegreen, as in "They killed the Duke of Earl and Lady Mondegreen." Well-known mondegreens include the faux Jimi Hendrix lyrics '"Scuse me while I kiss this guy" and Credence Clearwater Revival's classic warning that "There is a bathroom on (he right."

I'm generally good with song lyrics, so I never made those particular mistakes, nor thought that Johnny Rivers really was singing about a "Secret Asian Man."

That aside, I do seem to have a problem processing what I read with my peripheral vision. As a result, I'm constantly misreading things when I'm in a hurry.

One of those moments came in 1992 when I was living in Haiti, during the military government of Gen. Raoul Cedras. Glancing at a 10-gourde note, I could have sworn the bill said "Banana Republique de Haiti."

It's nice when a government can recognize its own shortcomings, but isn't it going a little far to admit it on the nation's money?

Newspapers can have “visual mondegreens,” often created by the blind spots we work ourselves into because of the presuppositions that guide the placement of articles, ads and photos.  In this business, we have all sorts of layout tricks to group page elements together and reduce confusion of what piece goes with what. One of the most common of these is the box, which we often use to mark stand-alone photographs that don't run with news stories.

Approximately four years ago, I was a reporter in Montgomery Township when Joanne Stransky, the longtime municipal clerk, retired. When Assistant Clerk Donna Kukla assumed her former supervisor's post, I wrote a short story introducing her to the community. The story was published with the headline "New clerk has familiar face."

Unfortunately, the editor also placed the story under a stand-alone picture of a chocolate Lab being spotlighted by the local animal shelter. The picture and caption were boxed, but that didn't make a difference.

I'm told that to this day, some Montgomery officials still call Donna "Pepper."

Ad placement also can be a tricky matter. In an advertising section such as automotive or real estate, publishing an ad next to a competitor's press release is a major no-no.

Even so, every now and then the advertising gurus foozle an ad placement so badly it baffles the rest of the civilized world.

Approximately six years ago, The Times of Trenton published a political advertisement on the obituary page. If that alone doesn't suggest some commentary on a politician's chances for election, consider the wording of the ad: "Bring back Caprio."

There are many people I would like to see brought back, even if it means reassembling them from spare parts. Not many politicians are on the list.

The all-time winner, though, has to go to an ad that I am told ran in the Bound Brook Chronicle a few years before I started to work at the chain the paper belonged to.

A trash-removal service came to the newspaper with a last-minute ad that absolutely had to be published that week. Unfortunately, the ad dummies already had been completed, and only one page had the space left to fit the ad.

And so it was that when longtime readers turned to the obituary page, they were greeted by the image of a large trash truck with the text "Have You Considered An Alternate Means of Disposal?"

Sometimes, I think, a policy on wedgies and engagements isn't such a bad thing, by comparison.