Misunderstandings & Spoonerisms
We were having a conversation over lunch about words we used to mispronounce or misunderstand and accidental spoonerisms. Hilarity ensued.
Miss SS's mum used to always say 'par cark' which although she always laughed at, has started to pick it up because her mum says it so often.
Miss SA thought that when people said the word 'psychic' that they were actually saying 'side kick' so always had nice Batman and Robin images crop up when people claimed they we psychic. It wasn't until she was about 14 that she worked it out.
Try to imagine you are six years old, on an aeroplane flying from Canada to Australia and you want a soft drink - Schweppes. Now imagine you had never seen this word before, but were proud of your reading skills so asked the air hostess for a 'Schweepees'. (Also imagine the man across the aisle snorting soft drink out of his nose in a fit of laughter and then him explaining to the air hostess what you meant.)
A dear friend from high school could never remember if bad dreams were called 'night-mares' or 'mare-nights'.
A friend of my mother's didn't know their was a difference between 'pheasants' and 'peasants' and was quite disgusted when she heard that people went out pheasant shooting ("Just because they are poor is no reason to go shooting them...").
I was convening a recruitment panel once where there was a question about fire and emergency procedures. One applicant got very flustered and admitted he had no idea what we were talking about, and that he had never heard the phrase before. He had been a security guard in a previous job so I couldn't understand why he didn't know about fire and emergency procedures. Lucky for him his application was fine and his other interview answers were good enough to get him a job. A year or so later I invited him to sit on a panel with me, and I wrote in a question similar to the one he had been stumped by - when we were going over the questions I reminded him of his interview. "oh, fire and emergency! I thought you were saying foreign emergency!"
My big misunderstanding as a child was thinking that the word 'war' was 'wall'. All these thousands of men who died in walls! It was a tragedy! I couldn't quite work out how they died - did they build walls and get caught in the gap? Did they run into walls and die? And where is the World Wall? And why are there two of them? Damn the wallls! Damn them!!!!
Miss SS's mum used to always say 'par cark' which although she always laughed at, has started to pick it up because her mum says it so often.
Miss SA thought that when people said the word 'psychic' that they were actually saying 'side kick' so always had nice Batman and Robin images crop up when people claimed they we psychic. It wasn't until she was about 14 that she worked it out.
Try to imagine you are six years old, on an aeroplane flying from Canada to Australia and you want a soft drink - Schweppes. Now imagine you had never seen this word before, but were proud of your reading skills so asked the air hostess for a 'Schweepees'. (Also imagine the man across the aisle snorting soft drink out of his nose in a fit of laughter and then him explaining to the air hostess what you meant.)
A dear friend from high school could never remember if bad dreams were called 'night-mares' or 'mare-nights'.
A friend of my mother's didn't know their was a difference between 'pheasants' and 'peasants' and was quite disgusted when she heard that people went out pheasant shooting ("Just because they are poor is no reason to go shooting them...").
I was convening a recruitment panel once where there was a question about fire and emergency procedures. One applicant got very flustered and admitted he had no idea what we were talking about, and that he had never heard the phrase before. He had been a security guard in a previous job so I couldn't understand why he didn't know about fire and emergency procedures. Lucky for him his application was fine and his other interview answers were good enough to get him a job. A year or so later I invited him to sit on a panel with me, and I wrote in a question similar to the one he had been stumped by - when we were going over the questions I reminded him of his interview. "oh, fire and emergency! I thought you were saying foreign emergency!"
My big misunderstanding as a child was thinking that the word 'war' was 'wall'. All these thousands of men who died in walls! It was a tragedy! I couldn't quite work out how they died - did they build walls and get caught in the gap? Did they run into walls and die? And where is the World Wall? And why are there two of them? Damn the wallls! Damn them!!!!
posted by Miff at
2:35 pm
2 Comments:
The only verbal fo’ par that I can remember as a youngster was my brother and I developed a habit of saying "far out" at anything new or interesting.
Unfortunately with out childhood enthusiasm it usually came out as "Fart", much to my Grandmothers disgust.
By
Anonymous, at 3:13 pm
I think they should be called Roospernisms.
By
Anonymous, at 9:23 pm
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