Mis-hearings

[WarpedWartWars]

What mis-hearings have happened to you?

I mis-heard my mom say "put it on my feet" as "poem feet".

please tell me if there's already a topic for this

[Talskubilos]

The Arabic greeting (As-)Salam Alaikum can be misheard in Spanish as ¡Será maricón! 'Should (he) be a faggot?'.

[WarpedWartWars]

I just mis-heard my mom say there was a "mini cheeseburger" or something like that. She then said what I mis-heard as that it's "just a jalapeño".

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I misheard the stammering when Cinderella's stepmother was introduced at the ball (in the Disney version) as "Lady Tremaine" (the announcer stutters a bit on the word "Lady"), and thought for the longest time that her name was "Leigh Tremaine", which I thought sounded rather anachronistic.

[Travis B.]

I've noticed that I readily mishear both initial and final [p t tʃ k] as spoken by non-native English speakers as /b d dʒ ɡ/, initially because initial /p t tʃ k/ is normally aspirated in English and finally because final /p t tʃ k/ is normally preceded by a shortened vowel and, if not preceded by a sibilant, is preglottalized or, in the case of final /t/, often glottalized completely.

[Linguoboy]

The Arabic greeting (As-)Salam Alaikum can be misheard in Spanish as ¡Será maricón! 'Should (he) be a faggot?'.

By whom? Not this Spanish-speaking faggot.

As a child, I had "ball-bearing [roller] skates". I'd never heard of ball bearings so I heard this as "barbarian skates" and even made up an explanation for why they were called that.

[WeepingElf]

My favourite mis-hearing is German Wankenzähler, a contraption of which nobody knows what it counts It happened soon after a Christmas some 40 years ago when my brother and I were given bicycle speedometers. My brother sang 'What shall we do with the drunken sailor?', and I misheard drunken sailor as Wankenzähler, thinking of the new speedometers.

[Travis B.]

My favourite mis-hearing is German Wankenzähler, a contraption of which nobody knows what it counts It happened soon after a Christmas some 40 years ago when my brother and I were given bicycle speedometers. My brother sang 'What shall we do with the drunken sailor?', and I misheard drunken sailor as Wankenzähler, thinking of the new speedometers.

When I saw that word, even before I read your whole post, I read it as a certain part-English, part-German compound...

[WarpedWartWars]

My favourite mis-hearing is German Wankenzähler, a contraption of which nobody knows what it counts It happened soon after a Christmas some 40 years ago when my brother and I were given bicycle speedometers. My brother sang 'What shall we do with the drunken sailor?', and I misheard drunken sailor as Wankenzähler, thinking of the new speedometers.

I put that into Bing Translate and I got "Wanken counter". The first thing I thought of was a counter (the kind sinks are put in) named after someone named Wanken.

[WeepingElf]

My favourite mis-hearing is German Wankenzähler, a contraption of which nobody knows what it counts It happened soon after a Christmas some 40 years ago when my brother and I were given bicycle speedometers. My brother sang 'What shall we do with the drunken sailor?', and I misheard drunken sailor as Wankenzähler, thinking of the new speedometers.

I put that into Bing Translate and I got "Wanken counter". The first thing I thought of was a counter (the kind sinks are put in) named after someone named Wanken.

That kind of counter is not called Zähler in German. Zähler refers to a machine or person that counts something.

[WarpedWartWars]

That kind of counter is not called Zähler in German. Zähler refers to a machine or person that counts something.

So, say, something with a button that increases a number each time the button is pressed would be called a Zähler?

[Talskubilos]

The Arabic greeting (As-)Salam Alaikum can be misheard in Spanish as ¡Será maricón! 'Should (he) be a faggot?'.

By whom? Not this Spanish-speaking faggot.

Really? Are you gay?

[WeepingElf]

That kind of counter is not called Zähler in German. Zähler refers to a machine or person that counts something.

So, say, something with a button that increases a number each time the button is pressed would be called a Zähler?

Yep.

[WarpedWartWars]

Yep.

You learn something new every day.

[Linguoboy]

The Arabic greeting (As-)Salam Alaikum can be misheard in Spanish as ¡Será maricón! 'Should (he) be a faggot?'.

By whom? Not this Spanish-speaking faggot.

Really? Are you gay?

Always have been.

And no matter how hard I try, I can't get from /sa.ˈlaː.mʕa.ˈlaj.kum/ to /seˈɾamaɾiˈkon/. These phrases simply sound nothing at all like each other to me.

[mocha]

A few years ago I was having lunch with my mother, discussing a female exchange student in a course I was taking. I forgot what exactly I was characterizing, but I said something was "some sort of abroad thing". She took this as "some sort of a broad thing".

As for eggcorns, my boyfriend uses "woof down" for "wolf down".

Speaking of which, there was some anime he tried getting me into with a character called "Shiggy". However, one of the VAs in the dub we were watching, I swear, sounded to me like they were saying "Shitty" and I just accepted that his name was unironically "Shitty" and didn't question it at all.

When he introduced me to LotR, I was also confused why Tolkien named a male character "Mary"... it seems so silly in retrospect I would mishear it that way...

[Talskubilos]

And no matter how hard I try, I can't get from /sa.ˈlaː.mʕa.ˈlaj.kum/ to /seˈɾamaɾiˈkon/. These phrases simply sound nothing at all like each other to me.

Think of an uneducated Spanish speaker, possibly from Southern Spain, and the fact Spanish has no final /-m/ -nor any other labial-, so it's pronounced as [n].

[Linguoboy]

And no matter how hard I try, I can't get from /sa.ˈlaː.mʕa.ˈlaj.kum/ to /seˈɾamaɾiˈkon/. These phrases simply sound nothing at all like each other to me.

Think of an uneducated Spanish speaker, possibly from Southern Spain, and the fact Spanish has no final /-m/ -nor any other labial-, so it's pronounced as [n].

Wait, so now we're talking about /sa.ˈlaː.mʕa.ˈlaj.kum/ as it would be pronounced by an Andalucian and not just heard by them?

IME, Spanish-speakers are perfectly capable of hearing final /m/ as [m] even if they can't consistently produce one themselves. I'm also familiar with Spanish-speakers merging coda /ɾ/ with /l/ (happens all the time in Caribbean Spanish) but the reverse seems far less common. So this still feels like a complete stretch to me in service of a very juvenile pun.

[Moose-tache]

By whom? Not this Spanish-speaking faggot.

Really? Are you gay?

Always have been.

He doesn't know how many of us gays there are on this site, because he has half of us on mute.

[Travis B.]

Really? Are you gay?

Always have been.

He doesn't know how many of us gays there are on this site, because he has half of us on mute.

This is probably the most gay place on the Interwebs which is not dedicated to things gay in and of itself I've been at, something our friend here has managed to completely miss.