Mis-hearings

[Moose-tache]

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.

To continue this off-topic conversation, I recently saw an episode of RuPaul where a profoundly unpleasant performer made a good point: gays tend to gravitate toward hobbies you can learn by yourself, because they often don't have or are afraid to participate in, group activities as children. That certainly describes conlanging circa 1990.

[WarpedWartWars]

My neighbor used to mis-hear "my bad" as "my bag".

[Linguoboy]

I’m not sure if it was an actual mishearing, but I can’t explain why my late husband would say “Yes, you are” whenever I said “My bad” unless he was parsing it as “I’m bad.”

[Darren]

I’m not sure if it was an actual mishearing, but I can’t explain why my late husband would say “Yes, you are” whenever I said “My bad” unless he was parsing it as “I’m bad.”

Maybe he heard it as a question "am I bad?" which would make sense phonologically and explain why his response sounds like an answer to a yes/no question.

[Talskubilos]

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?

Not exactly. The question is about the interpretation of an expresion in a foreign language unknown to the speaker. For example, when I was a teenager, I used to intreprete the first verse of the song Sunshine Reggae Give me, give me as Spanish Que me queme.

[Talskubilos]

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.

To continue this off-topic conversation, I recently saw an episode of RuPaul where a profoundly unpleasant performer made a good point: gays tend to gravitate toward hobbies you can learn by yourself, because they often don't have or are afraid to participate in, group activities as children. That certainly describes conlanging circa 1990.

No wonder I'm not a faggot nor a conlanger.

[Linguoboy]

No wonder I'm not a faggot nor a conlanger.

That's not your word to throw around however you like. Consider this an official warning.

[Talskubilos]

No wonder I'm not a faggot nor a conlanger.

That's not your word to throw around however you like. Consider this an official warning.

OK. Sorry if I offended you.

[Travis B.]

No wonder I'm not a faggot nor a conlanger.

That's not your word to throw around however you like. Consider this an official warning.

OK. Sorry if I offended you.

Just because members of a group can throw around words that refer to members of said group does not mean non-members of said group can do the same.

And please, lay off the emojis for once.

[Talskubilos]

Just because members of a group can throw around words that refer to members of said group does not mean non-members of said group can do the same. And please, lay off the emojis for once.

Understood.

[StrangerCoug]

I don't have the clearest voice, so when my parents would ask me what I wanted to get or where I wanted to go to get it and it didn't matter to me, they'd get it from what it sounded the closest to them to what I said (for example, if I said "wherever", it'd end up being Wal-Mart).

[Znex]

To continue this off-topic conversation, I recently saw an episode of RuPaul where a profoundly unpleasant performer made a good point: gays tend to gravitate toward hobbies you can learn by yourself, because they often don't have or are afraid to participate in, group activities as children. That certainly describes conlanging circa 1990.

Oof, that's too real for me.

[Travis B.]

I personally am quite straight, but I likewise have often been strongly attracted to solitary activities, which likely has similarly influenced my interests.

[alice]

I personally am quite straight, but I likewise have often been strongly attracted to solitary activities, which likely has similarly influenced my interests.

This describes me too.

[Linguoboy]

I personally am quite straight, but I likewise have often been strongly attracted to solitary activities, which likely has similarly influenced my interests.

This describes me too.

They never said only gays do this. The same probably applies to a range of marginalised groups (including neurodivergents).

To wrestle this thread back on topic, however, I had a convo last week with a friend where we talked about misheard lyrics and it reminded me of one of my all-time best fails. For years, I thought this line from "Love's Great Adventure" by Ultravox:

"They rang around my head / like empty tuneless harmonies."

was:

"They rang around my head / like empty Jewish harmonies."

I think perhaps that was influenced by recently having learned about the Gershwins but at this remove (the song was released in 1984) I couldn't say.

[Raphael]

Long ago, I used to think that the title line of the Neil Diamond song "Let Me Take You In My Arms Again" was something like "Let me [two syllables I couldn't parse] to my aunt again". I only discovered the real title today, with the help of Google.

[Raphael]

When I was 14 and on a student exchange in Ireland, I noticed that a lot of the Irish teens I met were fans of a band that they called something that sounded like "Waces" to me. I kept thinking "What is a 'wace', and why would a band name itself after the plural of that word?", until I finally realized that they meant Oasis.

[Linguoboy]

When I was 14 and on a student exchange in Ireland, I noticed that a lot of the Irish teens I met were fans of a band that they called something that sounded like "Waces" to me. I kept thinking "What is a 'wace', and why would a band name itself after the plural of that word?", until I finally realized that they meant Oasis.

My friend Rusty could never get the name of the band Butthole Surfers correct; he always called them "the Butthole Sniffers". His husband was like, "Wow, you came up with something even more offensive than what they were going for!"

[Moose-tache]

When I was 14 and on a student exchange in Ireland...

It's a miracle you understood anything at all.
"Hey Raff, let's balm out in dinetine Karch. We'll see that new fillum about Waces."

[Raphael]

I think I understood about half of what was going on around me - both what people were saying in real life and what people were saying in the US movies we watched. (I had started learning English at 10.) Oddly enough, I understood some people almost better than those with more "common" accents. For instance, I had no problem understanding those who pronounced "th" as if it was a simple "t".