(the third mishearing takes us, in street language, into fellatio-land, a place not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Recently logged, three mishearings of televised reels, two from commercials, one from a joke reel on Facebook, all easily verifiable as to what was said (vs. what I heard when I wasn’t looking at the tv, so didn’t get visual information about the text):
I’m not sure which substance offering body pain relief item 1 came from, but the expression is common in ads of many kinds; Muddy Mat commercials (item 2), for easily washable doormats (especially valuable if you have dogs tracking in mud and dirt), are all over the place; item 3, with BJs (referring to food from a restaurant chain, ostentatiously playing on an abbreviation for fellations), comes from a joke Facebook reel about giving BJs to homeless people, which you can watch here
All three mishearings are surprising if you’re watching the reels they come from; it’s crucial that I was looking away from the tv when I heard paint instead of pain and money instead of muddy and DJs (disc jockeys) inead of BJs (blow jobs) — because in all three cases, the intended words appear on-screen.
But still, but still… all three are preposterous; who needs relief from body paint, a mat for the money the dog tracks in, or disk jockeys to give to homeless people? And worse: the first two items came from commercials I had heard a number of times before, with no mishearing.
And then once I had that first mishearing, it was inclined to be sticky: on later repetitions, even looking at the screen, my mind very briefly dredged up the mishearing, triggering a startled moment during which I corrected course. A kind of information-retrieval earworm, very annoying. I have no explanation for this effect, and suspect that most people have experienced nothing of the sort, but there it is.
Some details. On the purely phonological side, all three mishearings are not at all surprising.
pain / paint, In fluent connected speech, the postvocalic /n/ is realized primarily as nasalization of the preceding vowel, with at most a brief alveolar stop; and then for some speakers (I am one), the syllable is closed by brief glottalization. Meanwhile, the syllable-final /t/ of paint is realized as a substantial glottal stop. The two words are then phonetically very similar, and are phonologically similar enough to count as half-rhymes.
muddy / money. More straightforward. Phonologically, a difference between oral and nasal stop intervocalically, again a good half-rrhyme. Phonetically, also an oral / nasal contrast, the details depending on the variety of English.
BJs / DJs. Again straightforward, here bilabial vs. alveolar. Acoustically quite similar, so again a good half-rhyme. BJs for DJs! could be an effective half-rhyming slogan.
BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse. Local to me, restaurants in Newark, San Mateo, and Cupertino. Describing themselves as
Energetic brewhouse featuring handcrafted beverages, craft kitchen favorites, award-winning house-brewed beer, and the world-famous Pizookie.
And offering. in more detail: burgers, pastas, soups, pizzas, salads, sandwiches and tacos, steaks, ribs, chicken, salmon, fish ‘n’ chips. Plus the Pizookie®, a kind of sundae: cookie / shortcake + ice cream + sauce (the name seems to be a portmanteau of pizza and cookie), for example:
the hot fudge brownie Pizookie®: “warm, gooey brownie | rich vanilla bean ice cream | dark chocolate hot fudge | toasted pecans | whipped cream | topped with a cherry”
The local businesses are part of a chain. From Wikipedia:
BJ’s Restaurants, Inc. is an American restaurant chain, headquartered in Huntington Beach, California [southeast of Los Angeles]. The chain operates under the names BJ’s Restaurant & Brewery, BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse, BJ’s Grill, and BJ’s Pizza & Grill.
BJ’s was founded in 1978 by Jim Kozen and Leonard Allenstein. It first opened in Santa Ana, California, as BJ’s Chicago Pizzeria. The original name was BJ Grunts, but due to a federal trademark conflict with RJ Grunts, a Chicago-based hamburger restaurant, the name was changed. [AZ: the name BJ Grunts, with no other source offered for the BJ part, suggests that playing with blow job / blowjob was there from the start]
… As of December 2022, BJ’s operated 215 restaurants in 29 states.
The lexicographic notes. (Well, of course, there were going to be lexicographic notes. You know me.) From NOAD:
noun blow job [or blowjob]: vulgar slang an act of oral sex performed on a man.
noun BJ: vulgar slang short for blow job.
Then on this blog:
— in my 9/28/13 posting “X job” (the snowclonelet composite), about the big three sexual X jobs: hand job, blow job, rim / ream job (+ rub job for frottage; fist job for fist-fucking not attested)
— in my 3/24/17 posting “The invention of the X job”, on the history of this vocabulary, with some social history of the acts themselves
The initials BJ. Will come up fairly frequently. People with these initials will just have to sail along, as my excellent Ohio State colleague Brian Joseph does. And then there’s Bernard Jay Leiderman, professional name BJ Leiderman. From Wikipedia:
Bernard Jay Leiderman (born February 14, 1956) is an American composer and songwriter. He is best-known for his theme music compositions for public radio programs, including National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, Science Friday, and American Public Media’s Marketplace.
BJL doesn’t speak, but he’s a notable presence on public radio.
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