Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From Ann Burlingham last week, this report from the Facebook account of her cousin Jay Steigmann, who is with Second City in Chicago:

Last night, I gave the direction to play a character more coquettishly. This was misinterpreted as “cokehead-ishly.”

An entertaining but not surprising mishearing, especially if the actor is more familiar with cokeheads than coquettes. (The Google Ngram Viewer shows a steady steep decline of coquette from 1900 to 2000. Much lower numbers for cokehead, of course. But a lot depends on the social context.)

This entry was posted on March 26, 2012 at 5:52 am and is filed under Mishearings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.