DEAR PROFESSOR: My mother worked for the Bureau of War Risk in 1919-20. She kept a notebook filled with pages of excerpts from classic welfare letters, all supposedly written to the bureau.
In the 1950s I worked for a short while at the Retained Accounts Division of the Army Finance Center, and I copied several pages of howlers accumulated there.I enclose copies of some of the pages from my mother's notebook as well as one page that I kept from my job containing 20 examples and titled "Finance Center Letters."
You will note that several items on the two lists are identical. - KAY CORNELIUS, HUNTSVILLE, ALA.
DEER KAY: I've collected so many examples of these "Welfare Letter" boner lists, all loaded with misspellings, malapropisms and double meanings, that sometimes I'm tempted to write that way myself.
It's interesting to have your mother's list (made 70 years ago), which contains several - as you say - "classic" examples of this genre, such as these two:
"I do not receive my husband's pay. If you do not send me my elopement I will be compelled to live an immortal life."
"According to your instructions, I have given birth to twins in the enclosed envelope."
Your list from the '50s showed only slight variations on these same two quotations, and it contained other familiar gems:
"In answer to your letter I gave birth to a boy weighing 10 pounds."
Coincidentally, I also received recently a similar list of boners from Ronald C. Semone of Washington, D.C. He found it in some files that a retired longtime employee of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (formerly the Veterans Administration) left behind.
Sure enough, there are the lines about "an immortal life" and "twins in the enclosed envelope." These are repeated verbatim, but the baby that was produced "in answer to your letter" in this version weighs in at 101 pounds!
As I have pointed out before, the tradition of attributing humorous quotations to citizens' letters that were supposedly written to government offices goes back at least to the years around World War I.
Each time a list of these howlers is published or photocopied, variations creep into the wording. Often the list is said to have been compiled from letters sent to some local welfare office.
Curtis D. MacDougall's 1940 book, "Hoaxes," quotes six examples of welfare bloopers, including the "immortal life" sentence and the one about the boy born "in answer to your letter." He also identifies several published versions of the list from the 1930s.
A book compiled in 1944 by Juliet Lowell, called "Dear Sir," contains hilarious letters that allegedly were sent to various government offices. On page 17 is the familiar "twins in the enclosed envelope" slip-up.
The latest book of language goofs that contains portions of the welfare letter list is Richard Lederer's popular "Anguished English," published in 1987 and reissued in paperback last year. His list of 14 funny goofs includes every one of the examples I've quoted above.
Lederer attributes them all to "letters written by citizens applying for payments from a state welfare agency." This is a common attribution given with the countless other reprintings of similar lists.
Of course, many times these lists are simply reproduced by individuals, using typewriters, computers or photocopiers.
Lederer is aware of this traditional circulation, for in a concluding note he refers to, "those intrepid verbivores who have so divinely gathered bloopers into folk photocopies, books, magazine squibs and newspaper articles."
That nicely describes the contents of a bulging file that I maintain for variations of "The Welfare Letter."