Queer thing: a writer or a speaker starts with a destination in mind, but on the way, things don’t come out the way he originally meant them to.

Indeed, when everything is said and done, though the final product is not at all what was intended, sometimes it can become an unintended, enduring source of amusement.

That’s how it is with me. I began this column with a different idea when, for no reason, things went west.

As in the film “Patton,” depicting the moment during the Battle of the Bulge, when the German commander, demanding the surrender of the imperiled Allied forces in the forest of Ardennes, received in return the answer “Nuts!” — the colloquial brother of “The Finger.”

“Nusse? Was bedeutet ‘nusse?’ or “What does nuts mean?” said the befuddled Germans, as they tried to interpret the literal German plural of nuts. I have always thought of that as the quintessential American response.

In another vein, the world got a kick out of the moment when a radio personality, to his lasting embarrassment, introduced the 31st President of the United States as “Hoobert Hever.”

And I particularly enjoyed when President Jimmy Carter, at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, commemorated the Hubert Humphrey, who had just passed, as “Hubert Horatio Hornblower.”

What happened as I set out on this column was that title of a 169-year-old phrase book that I hadn’t read in decades fell into my mind, and changed everything.

Here are a few excerpts from that book.

The authors of “Un novo guia conversação em portuguez e inglez” (“A new guide for conversation in Portugese and English”) meant it to be a serious work. But its inept use of literal translation quickly made it a go-to source of unintentional humor, and later earned it the title it is most well known by today: “English, as She Is Spoke.”

Here are some of the mistakes a translator with a green hand and almost no knowledge of the language he is writing about — here, English — can make to earn himself lasting fame of a type he never intended.

“Is there anything in conventional English which could equal the vividness of ‘to craunch a marmoset?’” in “The Book of Heroic Failures,” Stephen Piles says about one of the gaffes.

That was the translator’s stab at translating the French idiom “croquer le marmot,” a term meant to render “waiting patiently at the door,” with “croquer” referring to the knocking or rapping sound, “marmot” a term for the hideous door knockers popular at the time, and “craunch” an archaic term meaning to chew or crunch.

Among the work’s other gaffes is mistranslating the Portuguese phrase “chover a cântaros” as “raining in jars” — when at that very moment, the analogous English idiom “raining buckets” was ready, able, eager, even desperate to serve.

Apparently, President Abraham Lincoln and his Secretary of State, William Seward, read the book aloud to one another in the White House, and laughed their heads off. Lincoln had a score of books he loved to red in the dark times of the American Civil War to keep him from dropping into a pit of total despair.

The great American writer Mark Twain found “English as She Is Spoke” gaffes so amusing, he said: “Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow: it is perfect.”

Anyway, no deep thoughts here, just a laugh or two. As you know, the universe abounds in goofups like this. Find one and read it.

Have a happy Christmas.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.