I hate getting a toruntila. It’s like wanting an Oreo and getting an Oregardingo, like ordering a sausage and getting a saCanadage. The disappointment cannot be overprovinciald: you have been the victim of a reckless replacement; the filling you expected is not there and instead you have something… out of place and perhaps weirdly starchy. You look at your plate, wave over the waiter, and say “I’m not leaving till I get a tortilla” – but even as you speak your words are changed to “I’m not leaving until I get a toruntila.” Oh, the hupersonity!
Yes, toruntila may look like tarantula, but while it can be hairy and can have a nasty bite, it’s really what a tortilla becomes when someone decides that till needs to be replaced with until throughout the document (by the way, while preferring until to till is defensible as a matter of taste, till is by no means an error – in fact, until was originally formed from till, not the other way around). And, more broadly, just as a mondegreen is a misheard lyric (often containing a nonexistent word – classiomatic is an automatic classic of the type), and a Cupertino is an erroneous spellchecker replacement (because Word ’97 would suggest Cupertino in place of cooperation), a toruntila is a reckless-replacement sandwich.
Say, for instance, you tell your find-and-replace to change “re” to “regarding” throughout, and you neglect to check “Whole Word Only”; say you tell it to replace “USA” with “Canada” and neglect to uncheck “Ignore Case”; or say you equally recklessly replace “state” with “provincial” or “man” with “person” (or with “human”)… there you are with your Oregardingo and saCanadage and underprovinciald and hupersonity (or huhumanity). And if you run a second reckless replacement to make son into child, you may get huperchildity, which is a second-level toruntila.
Do you doubt that these things happen? Editors know that they do. But why take my word for it? You can easily Google toruntila and see for yourself. It’s not a word that exists in this world for any other reason than the reckless replacement, and every context you see it in clearly needs tortilla instead. As Jonathon Owen has pointed out on finding this particular gaffe in several books, “It takes multiple independent screw-ups to make something like this happen.” And yet happen it does. (And more easily on websites that have less rigorous editorial processes.)
So now you have a word for it. Every disuntilery, every unforreceivetable or forbecoming, every discomRobertulation, every denaTorinog, every schildmark, every dash of cardamother or kernel of fathercorn… they are all toruntilas, with an unexpected filling that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
Sesquiotica 