Locke was surprised by the conversations of Prince Maurice's Parot. This was a Brazilian parot, but spoke fluent French. Since Maurice spoke Dutch only, the parot's talk had to improperly translated but he got the gist.
Grice had read about this in his youth, and had written about it in his 1941 essay for _Mind_. A few years later he found at Blackwell's a copy of Carnap's Intro to Semantics that read,
pirots karulise elatically.
Surely he meant -- 'parots'?
In unwritten correspondence ("Letters Unsent") Carnap says that he actually meant "pirate" ("I had just seen "Pirates of Penzance" and found that I could play a little Poirot by amusing my reader").
Etc.
(Puns courtesy of J. Huggins, of Los Gatos -- genius!)
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