In my 7/14 posting “Making a mango crazy in bed”, a surprising mishearing on my part. The speaker said:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy?
But what I heard was:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a mango crazy?
The (sex-infused) mangos just dropped in from the sky, bafflingly, with no justification I could see. (Intended [mæn.go] and perceived [mæŋgo] are very close acoustically, but mango makes no sense in the context. )
Then on the 17th it was kapok. Maybe it’s a plant thing.
This time it was a National Public Radio story I heard on 7/17, about the animated movie KPop Demon Hunters (“a viral smash that crushes the songs”, according to NPR), whose title I heard as Kapok Demon Hunters (stuffed and all cottony-soft, presumably). Both kapok and KPop / K-pop are low-frequency lexical items, and they are, again, acoustically very similar, but kapok makes no sense in the context.
The items. From NOAD:
noun kapok: a fine, fibrous substance like cotton that grows around the seeds of the ceiba tree, used as stuffing for cushions, soft toys, etc.
Then from Wikipedia:
K-pop (Korean: 케이팝; Revised Romanization: Keipap; an abbreviation of Korean popular music) is a form of popular music originating in South Korea. The music genre … emerged in the 1990s as a form of youth subculture, with Korean musicians taking influence from Western dance music, hip-hop, R&B and rock. Today, K-pop commonly refers to the musical output of teen idol acts, chiefly girl groups and boy bands, who emphasize visual appeal and performance.
The phonetic similarity. Though their points of articulation — velar [k], (bi)labial [p] — are way distant from one another, their acoustic properties are close — they “sound similar” — especially in syllable-final position, so that the [ak] of kapok is in fact very similar to the [ap] of KPop, making them easily confusable, also making them good half-rhymes in poetry and song, as in this example photocopied from my extremely antique paper “This rock and roll has got to stop”, on rhyme in rock music (Chicago Linguistic Society, 1976):
[k] and [p] half-rhyming for the Who
The movie: Wikipedia with the basic facts:
KPop Demon Hunters is a 2025 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Sony Pictures Animation and released by Netflix. It was directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, from a screenplay by Kang, Appelhans, Hannah McMechan and Danya Jimenez, based on a story conceived by Kang. The film stars the voices of Arden Cho, Ahn Hyo-seop, May Hong, Ji-young Yoo, Yunjin Kim, Daniel Dae Kim, Ken Jeong, and Lee Byung-hun. It follows a K-pop girl group, Huntr/x, who lead double lives as demon hunters; they face off against a rival boy band, the Saja Boys, whose members are secretly demons.
KPop Demon Hunters originated from Kang’s desire to create a story inspired by her Korean heritage, drawing on elements of mythology, demonology, and K-pop to craft a visually distinct and culturally rooted film.
The music is clearly lots of fun, and there’s a forest of complex touches in the script and scene-setting. Including, apparently, a gigantic amount of word play — charmingly explained for us (even those of us not steeped in the language and culture) in a YouTube video:
K-pop Demon Hunters explained [without spoilers] by a [teacher of Korean]: K-pop Demon Hunters is full of Korean culture and language details you might’ve missed. It’s even more enjoyable when you know what’s behind them — from everyday life to to deeper layers of culture and history!
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