Epic moments of mishearing

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This morning my friend Ginger was getting ready to leave our house with her seven-year-old daughter Annabel. As we moved toward the front door, Annabel stopped, looked at Ginger, and declared:

“A cunt.”

We stood there, obviously stunned and not responding to her, so she repeated,

“A cunt!”

Ginger and I looked at each other in perplexity, frantically trying to parse this situation and react appropriately. Then suddenly a look of enlightenment broke on Ginger’s face, and she said, “Oh! You want to ask about bringing Claire to the Easter egg hunt!” As we laughed hysterically, she told me for a moment she worried the child had been watching a lot of Game of Thrones or something.

2

When I first started working in Mexico years ago, and my Spanish was not yet entirely fluent, I misheard my boss – he said una fruta jugosa (a juicy fruit), but I heard una puta fogosa (a horny whore).

3

Once when my son was young, maybe about 4 or 5, he was play fighting with my nieces then boyfriend. He did a kick towards her boyfriend and he asked my son where he learned to kick like that and my son said proudly, ‘That’s a nigger kick’. Everybody froze and I said. ‘Where did you hear that?’. My son is laughing and says on TV.
I was mortified and was trying to think what in the world he could be watching to hear that.
Then we realized he was saying NINJA kick.

Another time on a TV commercial they were advertising a 4G party. I heard it as ORGY party and looked up to see a bunch of kids dancing around. Then I realized what had actually been said. I thought it was only me but several other people said they had heard it as orgy party as well and were upset that it was on during daytime TV when their kids were watching.
The commercial didn’t last long, maybe they got too many complaints about it.

4

When I was around 4 or 5, I asked my mom how to spell “dong”. She asked where I was getting that word from and I said, " you know that song Delta Dong, what’s that flower you have on".

5

I work as a social worker in a busy emergency department. Recently one of the young residents came to me to ask for help in setting up in-home supports for an elderly patient. He was giving me the pertinent information on what the patient needed, and added rather offhandedly, “And he’s a homo, too”.

I was quite shocked, to the point where I didn’t say anything, just nodded dumbly. After recovering, I realized I needed to say something to the resident about how inappropriate his remark was. I stepped back over to him, tapped him on the shoulder to say something, and realized in a brief moment of enlightenment, that he had said “He’s on home O2”, meaning home oxygen.

When I realized he was staring at me, I told him I had misunderstood what he said, and we both ended up having a good laugh. Also, two other people standing nearby said they also though he said “homo, too”, and they were trying to figure out what to say to him.

6

The Indiana Beaver of the WNBA.

7

At one point there was a government advisory about sunblock that used a numerical classification for darkness of skin. Shortly after one of my mates was ribbing me for retiring to the shade while he gloried in the English summer sun. “it’s all right for you with your type 4 skin” I said, referring to his meditteranean complexion.

He looked at me aghast, having heard “tight foreskin.”

8

Early in dating a girl in college, we were joking around and I said “Fuckin-A!”

She said “Fuck me, it’s got more holes!”

Silence on my part. I’m sure dazed look, glassy eyes, drool…

“What??”

Turns out she said “Fuck a ‘B’, it’s got more holes.”

9

I was coaching a girls’ sports team with ages 12-15. One day, one of the girls came up to me in great frustration. “I can’t masturbate!” she exclaimed. I stared, dumbfounded, and asked her to repeat herself. She said the same thing again. I was extremely flustered, and floundering for the right thing to say, when it finally clicked that she was having trouble learning a particular skill. Her complaint really was, “I can’t master it!”

10

My parents had some spectacular misunderstandings, since they were both hard of hearing. The one I remember most fondly:

(My father gets off the phone with his parents, whom they normally visited each Christmas.) “Looks like we’ll be spending Christmas at home this year.”

Mother: “Alone? I’m not spending Christmas alone.”

Father: A loan? What the hell do you need a Christmas loan for? Don’t I make enough that you can afford presents?

This went on for several more minutes until I finally stepped in and (loudly) straightened them out.

11

When I was checking for something at a hospital:

Nurse: “And a Mexican is your mother?”

Me: “what???”

Nurse: “And your next of kin is your mother?”

Me: “Ohhhhhh I thought you said a Mexican is your mother!”

Me and nurse: “Bwahahahahaha!”

12

One time I was at the dentist’s, and just before leaving, he told me that he didn’t want me to get freaked out, but there was a black guy out in the waiting room. I was like, uh, okay… and I left wondering why he would need to warn me about that, thoroughly confused. Then I went out into the waiting room to get to the front door, and there was a homeless guy out there, not a black guy. I don’t know exactly what the dentist said, but obviously he didn’t say a black guy.
One I witnessed at work once: I was in a room with a patient and the doctor I worked for, and he said to her, “My patient in other room says that her husband recently died, and he had a nice hearing aid, and you could have it.” Without skipping a beat, the patient said, “Oh that’s okay, I’ve been seeing my dentist for a long time.”

13

I haven’t told this one in a while, stupid verbal parsing error on my side.

Quite a while ago we were talking about some some hyped congressman who was rumored to be planning to run for president. I said 'Nah, it’ll never happen, He’s just too much of a lightweight." One of my friends, seemingly agreeing with me in tone, said “yeah, he’s just another dank whale.”

Dank whale? :confused: WTF is that? is it some kind some kind of odd, pretentious Moby Dick reference?

I spent the next hour totally distracted trying to figure out the reference. Finally I swallowed my pride, and asked another friend what was up with the ‘whale’, I just didn’t get it. That confused the hell out of him. After a painfully embarrassing and confusing 10 minutes or so, trying to explain enough to get him back to the point where the ‘whale’ came from.

Finally we deduced back to the original comment was that the guy 'was just another Dan Quayle" :smack::smack::smack:

14

In the 70s-80s there was a slightly eccentric New York TV news personality named Gene Shalit. One day he was sent a letter by an elderly gentleman with imperfect hearing that for years had thought his name was “Green Salad.”

15

My wife and I went to an energetic jazz performance in New York City a few years ago. Afterwards, I thought she said the drummer “played great…he went batshit!”

Turned out she had said

that his playing was passionate.

16

This news report about an Australian man selling his home in the newspaper with sentence “No Asians” is pretty epic.

17

When my kid was about 4 she’d done something fairly advanced for her age, and I said, “You’re such a big girl.”

She turned to me with her hands on her hips and very indignantly said, “I’m not a burro!”

“No, I said ‘big girl’.” “Oh…”

18

When I was little my dad said something about his father being “retired.”

I said “GRANDDAD’S RETARDED?!!”

My dad said something like “Well sometimes I think so…” then explained about not having to work anymore when you get old.

19

This is not so much a mishearing as an epic misunderstanding. It turns on not one but two words with dual meanings. It also revolves around a young me, and is more than a little embarrassing, but here goes. (By the way, the set-up for this tale is a little involved, so I won’t be offended by those who declare TL;DR — a term I just recently learned the meaning of!)

This is probably an unknown for younger or non-American readers, but in 50s and 60s much of the country was galvanized by the sensational trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard, a Cleveland physician who was convicted of brutally murdering his wife in 1954. Sheppard always maintained his innocence, and indeed his conviction was overturned in 1966. (This incident also inspired the very popular TV show of the 1960s, The Fugitive.)

My story would have taken place in the early 1960s, when I was less than 10 years old. With the court appeals and the generally sensationalist nature of the incident, it was still very much in the news then.

As my mom was a single working mom, I spent summers during the day with my aunt, who lived just down the street from us. Just a little ways down the street from her house was a corner drugstore, to which my aunt was always sending me to buy her cigarettes (with a note, of course) and other miscellaneous items.

Apparently, a book had just come out in paperback entitled The Sam Sheppard Murder Case, and my aunt told me to see if the drugstore happened to have it, and if so to buy it for her.

At this time, the term “paperback” was not in wide usage; books of this nature tended to be called “Pocketbooks” after the first publisher to have success with them (remember their logo with the kangaroo?).

So she said “Sam Sheppard Murder Case” and “pocketbook.” I somehow didn’t hear the “murder” part of the equation — so I thought she was telling me to look for a purse of some kind!

After carefully checking all of the drugstore’s wares, I had what must have been a baffling conversation with an employee, and returned empty-handed. Between us, my aunt and I finally figured out the miscommunication, and had a good laugh about it.

20

During a child-birth class with my wife, the instructor advised that “at this stage, her cervix is open forty-five centimeters.”

Me - “What?! FORTY-FIVE centimeters?”

Her - "No… I said four to five centimeters.

I, for one, was relieved.