🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate July, ok a day late, life has been difficult, here in the Dispossession Zone (I worked from 4 to 8 am today sorting stuff in this house to get rid of, this after coming back to life, solid food, and unsoiled clothing after three days of nasty intestinal affliction, so I am one weary bear — but clean, and looking forward to sushi for lunch), oh have I mentioned the construction workers tossing pieces of junk down from the sky (well, the roof), accidentally cutting off the electricity, and generally lobbing bombs into my daily life?
But enough of street entertainment. Time for a brief note from my correspondence, a query to AMZ the psycho/sociolinguist from someone — call them X — reporting on an odd experience that they had and hoping I could illuminate it, and give the phenomenon it illustrated a name.
The event: a speaker — call them Y — reached a point in their presentation where their audience would expect them to utter an expression E, but instead uttered an entirely different expression E′, which was, however, prosodically similar to E — E′ had, so to speak, the same melody, but not the same words, as E — but, with the exception of my correspondent X, apparently no one in the audience noticed what Y did; they seem to have understood Y to have said E, rather than E′, and so showed no sign of confusion or surprise (while X was astonished).
What happened there, and what was that called?
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