A misplaced definite and an indefinite article changes the meaning of a sentence just as an accent and emphasis on the wrong syllable alters the meaning. This is exactly what happened to a clerk at a local Indiana bakery, Marsh, who misheard 22-year-old, Laura Gambrel's mother's instructions.
Gambrel's mom, Carol Gambrel, ordered a graduation cake to celebrate her daughter's success. She wanted the cake to be done in colors of the Indiana University with a picture of her daughter's face, a scroll and a graduation cap, which she wanted as an icing at the top of Gambrel's head. The baker seemed to have accidently noted 'cat' instead of 'cap.'
"When I went to pick it up at the store, I could not stop laughing," said Carol, 59. "I told them not to scrape it off. It was one of those young kids behind the counter and he seemed a little distracted with someone else ordering a cake a foot away from us. We went through the school colors and everything, and I said, 'Oh, could you draw a cap on her head?' And he gives me this look.
The Zionsville, Ind. family now calls it the 'cat cake.' The staff at the Indiana Bakery drew a cute kitty with pink nose and white whiskers on the graduate's portrait cake.
"I just graduated college, it was my sister's birthday and it was Father's Day," Gambrel said. "My grandparents were visiting from out of town, and we thought we'd knock out three holidays at once. So my mom thought it would be funny to get a face cake."
"I can only image them doing it and thinking I was going to vet school or something," Gambrel said.
The family luckily has one more chance to get the graduation cake right, when Laura finishes her Masters of Public Affairs degree in sustainable development. She recently graduated from IU in May.
