Conflation of Putter and Totter

In an earlier post I referred to wishing to be able to tend to my flowers when I am 88 years old. I used the term "potter" to refer to that tending activity.

I didn't look up the word, and had doubts about its usage after someone called it to my attention as a misspelling. (We all know that composition teachers should never be caught making spelling errors.) But my subconscious was on target after all. Potter is a synonym for putter.

I think I used it because it sounded so much more like "totter" which is what I might expect to be doing if I was 88. So, although entirely subconscious, it provided just the connotation I wanted when I wrote about Nellie falling frequently while she was out tending her flowers at 88.

"Conflation" is a term I learned while doing some of the technical writing with Hiromi that was involved in our co-authored book on Greek Bible texts. It happened, even in early Bible versions, when a person who was familiar with several versions of the same event, inserted material from another source into a translation of a passage that originally did not include the inserted detail. The result was a combination of two versions from different writers--an "amplified" version, in fact. It provides a great deal of fodder for the "King James Only" people who see a conspiracy in this scenario, but our research did not reveal a single case where the content suggested anything nefarious.