Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s One Big Happy, in which Ruthie mishears a phrase by dividing it into words not in the intended way:

grave event > gravy vent. It’s possible to distinguish the two in speech, but in ordinary connected speech, they’re homophonous. Of course, gravy vent doesn’t make much sense, but then that’s true of many other mishearings as well.

Word division mishearings are not uncommon, and word division is sometimes also exploited in jokes.

This entry was posted on March 3, 2016 at 6:03 am and is filed under Errors, Linguistics in the comics, 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.