Crowl or Crawl?

Crowl as Urban Slang

In one of those idle moments when the brain is parked in a lay-by, I typed my surname into the search engine on Blogger.com. I shouldn’t have been surprised that a number of people had typed “crowl” instead of “crawl” and had never noticed (who apart from me proof-reads their blog scribblings?), but seeing my name leap out from some of the most random writing on the planet is disconcerting.

It even turns up in foreign language texts. Is it a slang word that crosses borders? And talking of slang, on a site that defined “urban slang” I was shocked to find “crowl” allegedly means: “To make vigorous, often violent, viscious or even forcable or animalistic love by means of penetration of any orafice with the turgid male genitalia.” I say allegedly, since the three spelling mistakes rather undermines my confidence in the writer’s street creds. Perhaps they actually meant to write “crawl”. (And did they really mean “any orifice?” – nostrils?)

A Spelling Mistake?

Many blog writers don’t have too cosy a relationship with grammar and spelling. We can excuse those for whom English is a second language: “I want to know does search engines crowl websites without submission. Should website important to submit to Search engines. I have some website for promotion so I want to know that Search engine will not crowl without submission.” (At least I hope this is a writer for whom English is a second language.)

The next writer, however, has style: “I’m detached. I don’t want to do anything with this ugly politics anymore. If I’m lucky I’ll find a hole in some quiet corner of the world and crowl there and continue my research on Machine Translation and live my own life and don’t care a bit about anything that happens anywhere. If I see a needy, I’ll help. But I’ll forget dying African kids, and greedy thiefs of higher society… Let them do anything they want.”

Religious Crawl-ers

Perhaps the next writer was too troubled by his angst to notice where his fingers were flying: “I woke up and I looked into the mirror and standing there was someone else… Not me. I have to say that I really didn’t like what I saw. What happened with the VERY confident guy that used to stare back at me and say: “Today will be a great day!!”??? I really don’t know…What I saw there, in the mirror, was a fraction of what I used to see…My walk has fallen into a crowl…I didn’t want to fall straight into a halt… If that happens I might as well just curl and die…I have never been so close to His will and then everything just piled up trying to tumble me to my knees and admit defeat… But I think I’ve got some news for ya…I won’t give up and I will be at the centre of His will! God…I know things won’t be easy… Help me…I think I might be losing my mind…”