ABSTRACT
In the satirical magazine Private Eye there appears regularly a selection of linguistic blunders made by television and radio presenters. This selection is headed, in bold print, by the title Colemanballs; so named because the eponymous David Coleman, a BBC sports commentator, is a perennial offender in this area and is responsible for more of these faux pas than any other presenter. The tokens which comprise Colemanballs are collected by, presumably, Private Eye readers who are rewarded, on publication of their contribution, by a small payment from the magazine. So popular has Colemanballs become in the United Kingdom that three collections have been published, and these volumes are frequently on display in newsagents, bookshops, airport terminals, railway stations, and such like. This essay will simply draw on a range of techniques in linguistic pragmatics in order to explain how Colemanballs humour is created. It will attempt to highlight the regular patterns of error and provide some framework for assessing the natural categories into which many of the examples fall. Such an analysis will, of necessity, be qualitative rather than quantative, drawing on over fifty tokens from the three Colemanballs collections.
