Lightning posting: Downy fabric softener commercial on tv, heard out of the corner of my ear:
It brings mice into your laundry
I contemplated the other indoor plagues I have suffered here in Palo Alto: houseflies, clothes moths, Argentine ants. No cockroaches. Only the occasional silverfish or centipede. Rats and squirrels yearning to get indoors, but without success. No mice.
And now a fabric softener could bring mice upon me.
Ah, then it’s a damn good thing I don’t use fabric softener, Downy or any other.
Oh. Apparently what Downy is said to do is …
It breathes life into your laundry
Better than mice, but still unsettling. The prospect of my sweaty skivvies and socks brought to life and lurching about the household unnerves me.
July 16, 2024 at 6:34 am |
This kind of thing happens to me all the time – I hear something in an ad that seems wildly inappropriate or bizarre, and even after I figure out what they must actually be saying I can’t unhear the original interpretation. (Unfortunately I can’t recall any specific examples while sitting here at my computer.)
July 16, 2024 at 7:16 am |
Happens to me at least once a day; for a while, I kept a record of all these mishearings (and there’s a Page on my mishearing postings), but there’s just no way to keep that up (and get on with the rest of my life). I was just much entertained by this one and so passed it on.
Two things. One, the mishearings are often real-life preposterous, so they’re sort of anti-Freudian slips of the ear. Two, they are, as you note, often surprisingly sticky, and color your perceptions again and again.
July 16, 2024 at 1:54 pm |
An example I recall was a radio ad for a medical group (during open-enrollment season), featuring their highly-rated incompetence. I think they were trying to say that competence was something they were highly rated in, but that’s not what I heard!
July 18, 2024 at 10:27 am |
An amusing example from the last day or two: The local public classical-music radio station has been promoting an upcoming run of A Little Night Music, and it is described as featuring “Send in the Clowns”. What’s atypical of this example is that I heard the song title correctly the first couple of times, but then yesterday I heard it as “Sand in the Clouds”, and now that’s what comes up in my brain whenever I hear it.