Archive for the ‘Mishearings’ Category

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Stained by poppies

March 30, 2026

Going past me yesterday morning, a tv ad for some remedy for, as I heard it, teeth stained by poppies (and other foods).

Yes, coffee. With blueberries, black tea, and red wine, a classic offender against dental whiteness. Granting that I have /a/ (in addition to /ɔ/)  as an alternative accented vowel in coffee, poppies is a complex but phonologically unsurprising mishearing; coffee and poppies are in fact excellent half-rhymes / imperfect rhymes:

My morning coffee
By a field of poppies

(with two feature rhymes, both well-attested — (initial) p for k and (medial) p for f — plus a subsequence rhyme, with the final z of poppies against the absence of a final consonant in coffee; for the terminology, see my 1976 Chicago Linguistic Society paper “Well, this rock and roll has got to stop. Junior’s head is hard as a rock.”, available on-line here)

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Posted in Errors, Language and plants, Language play, Mishearings, My life, Poetry | 4 Comments »

Countermanic Baroque

March 27, 2026

E-mail from Ellen Kaisse this morning, for the annals of mishearing:

— EK > AZ: I got all bent out of shape this morning when I thought I heard an ad for a prescription drug called Vivaldi. How dare they appropriate the name of a beloved Baroque composer? Further investigation revealed that it is called Lybalvi.

— AZ > EK:  Lovely. With you, I am offended on Vivaldi’s behalf.

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Posted in Errors, Mishearings, Music | Leave a Comment »

Lizard warning

February 23, 2026

Yes, yes, I am bombarded with blizzard warnings, for the terrifying storm now bringing NYC and the surrounding areas to a standstill. But, bafflingly, though I am fully aware that the warnings are about a blizzard, I keep hearing them as announcing a lizard warning — as if I must now beware of a rain of cold-stunned iguanas falling from the trees or an advancing army of marauding Komodo dragons.

Sadly, since we are now in the zone of terrifying creatures, I have to tell you that Gojira / Godzilla is a reptilian (or dinosaurian) monster, or kaiju, not a squamate one (all lizards are reptiles, but not all reptiles are lizards). You should indeed be alarmed by the news that Godzilla is on the rampage in your neighborhood — that means it’s slated for utter devastation — but such a bulletin is not, technically, a lizard warning. It would be a grievous usage error to race through the streets screaming the lizards are coming! the lizards are coming!

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Posted in Errors, Humor, Language and animals, Mishearings, Movies and tv | 3 Comments »

Making a mango crazy in bed

July 14, 2025

My life has recently been extraordinarily difficult and extravagantly painful, but at the moment my fingers are up to a small amount of typing, so here’s an odd mishearing to amuse you. This posting is way gay and attentive to male bodies, and there’s a photo (hunky rather than raunchy, but it does involve ostentatious shirtlessness featuring prominent six-packs), so it will not be to everyone’s taste.

In a Facebook short reel that came past me this morning — I’m in need of distractions from the pain — we see two gay guys (both hunks in swimsuits, though of two very different body types), with gay guy A interviewing gay guy B:

What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy? Show me with your hands.

The scene:

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Posted in Errors, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Mishearings, Phonetics | Leave a Comment »

Nutritional mishearing

May 28, 2025

I posted this query on Facebook yesterday:

— AZ: I’ve been regularly getting a tv spot ad for the Boost Max nutritional drink , ‘Here’s to Now: Boost Max’ (published 8/13/24), in which a young Black man says what I hear as “Here’s to bean meat soup every Thursday” (which puzzles me). Can anyone correct — or confirm — my impression?

You can view the ad, from ispot.tv, here.

Crucially, I failed to take into account the context the speaker is in; I really should know better.

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Posted in Context, Language and food, Language of advertising, Mishearings | Leave a Comment »

Afflicted with aphids

April 20, 2025

[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]

Regularly playing on MSNBC, the tv commercial “No Time to Wait”, featuring an earnest and friendly Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (now 78 years old) telling us

I have AFib (/éfɪb/ atrial fibrillation, the irregular heart rhythm)

which I heard as

I have aphids /éfɪdz/

(You can watch the commercial here.)


A screen shot from the commercial; Kareem is holding a basketball just in case you’ve forgotten who he is

It’s immensely pleasing to me that he’s still alive and is doing good things.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Language and sports, Language in advertising, Mishearings, Movies and tv | 2 Comments »

Alaskan prime

January 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month January and the year 2025

From Chris Waigl on Facebook yesterday. One fact that you need to know about CW is that she lives in Fairbanks AK (further facts, about CW and about Alaska, will become relevant as we go on):

Soft-spoken barista in a medium-loud café, as heard by me: … and would you like salmon on top of your cappuccino?

The barista said cinnamon, CW heard salmon. Phonologically similar, but from two different conceptual worlds. Why would CW even have entertained the possibility that the barista was offering salmon?

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Posted in Context, Errors, Holidays, Mishearings, Misreadings, Perception, Psycholinguistics, Salience | Leave a Comment »

Today’s mishearing

November 14, 2024

Just a moment ago on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House”, the host, Nicolle Wallace, delivered a pitch for the Deadline: Legal Blog, giving instructions on how to subscribe, concluding with what I heard as:

You’ll have a fresh new sweater delivered to your mailbox every Friday

Well, yes, she said newsletter, and though this actual word hadn’t appeared before in her brief pitch, a newsletter was an unsurprising thing to come up in the context of news television and blogs, while sweaters and other articles of apparel were far from  the material in her program.

Pixies, I blame pixies. And, of course, sunspots.

 

Posted in Mishearings, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Annals of mishearing: effing gee, the carpet store

September 16, 2024

A frequently experienced tv commercial in recent days, encountered at first only through the audio, which I heard to be for a local carpet company called, apparently, effing gee or effing G, involving the verb F or eff /ɛf/, an initialistic euphemism for fuck. Given my nature and my professional interest in taboo vocabulary, it would be fair to think of my perception as Freudian mishearing, of who knows what original. But, surely, a carpet company wouldn’t choose a name with fucking encoded in it, maybe playfully conveying that it was fucking good (though that would be a bold commercial move).

The next time I heard the ad, I understood the company name to be effigy, which is at least an English word (and not a swear), but baffling as a company name. Significantly, having heard the name originally as beginning with /ɛf/, that perception persisted.

Next time around, I shifted my perception to something more likely, in which /ɛf/ is in fact a letter name: FnG, that is F&G. This would be a common pattern in company names; a sampling of F&R companies:

F&R Auto Repair (Woodland CA), F&R Auto Sales (Hialeah FL), F&R Towing (San Jose CA), F&R Engineering (Roanoke VA), F&R American Fine Fragrance (Winston Salem NC)

Finally, I looked at the screen, and saw that the company’s name was indeed initialistic, but was S&R, not F&R. /f/ and /s/ are minimally distinct acoustically, so are often confused in perception. My initial perception was skewed towards /f/ because of my bias towards fucking — and so towards fucking and effing — and once established that perception persisted, despite repetitions of /s/.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Errors, Euphemism, Furnishings and tools, Initialisms, Language in advertising, Mishearings, Names, Perception, Phonetics, Taboo language and slurs, Trade names | 6 Comments »

Soft mice

July 15, 2024

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.

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Posted in Errors, Language in advertising, Mishearings, My life | 4 Comments »

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