When I was about 18 or 19, back in the days when I was smokin’ a lot of weed, I was at my friend’s place getting high with him and another friend. His dad (laidback about weed so that wasn’t an issue) came in and talked casually with us for a bit about his work. He did something in field of engineering maybe, I forget, and in his back and forth with his son about the day he said the word “resonance”. My friend: “wait, wait… residence?”, “no no, resonance… res - O - nance…”, “Ohh. resonance, I thought you said residence”, and the conversation ended and he left, and I was totally shy and introverted the whole time off to the side out of the conversation, but after he left I said (totally truthfully): “I thought he said resin hits*” and laughter ensued.
*“resin” in this case refers to the black residue left behind in a bowl or pipe after smoking pot, so a “resin hit” is when you’re outta weed and you torch the pipe intensely in hopes of smoking the resin".
There’s a service we need: Weather forecasts in colloquial English. “It’s probably gonna rain like hell for a few hours around noon, then clear right up and be windy as fuck until sundown, at which point it’s gonna freeze and the roads’ll all be icy fuckers. It’s shaping up to be a real shitshow for the next few days, so stay the fuck inside unless you know how to drive, dumbass.”
This might actually save lives in the event of serious weather. Somehow, the usual formulations don’t have the same punch as “There’s a goddamned tornado coming your way. Get the fuck to safety or die, moron.”
Well before I was born and back in the late 50’s early 60’s I guess, my parents had a neighbor they didn’t know very well. One day the neighbor came over looking down and my mother asked her what was wrong. She said, “My dad died”. Well, my mother heard, “My cat died”. Now my mother was not too fond of cats and proceeded to say, “OH, is that all? I got rid of mine a month or two ago. We couldn’t keep him off the counters so we took him out to the country and left him.”
She says the woman looked horrified, Then… then my mother says…
“Was yours that big black one that was always roaming the neighborhood?”
My dad was standing behind the lady and clearly heard what she had said. He was frantically waving his arms and mouthing “NO! NO! NO!”
When my oldest was about a year and a half old, we were getting into the car and I could have sworn he said “kiss a rock.” I looked puzzled and asked, “kiss a rock?” and he said, “No. Kiss a rock.” Then he pointed and said it again.
I looked, and he was pointing at the lock for the glove compartment. It dawned. “Oh. Keys in lock?” Yep. That was it. He was letting me know that he had figured out how keys worked. That was cool and I appreciated him sharing that with us. The appreciation didn’t stop my husband and I from using “kiss a rock” as a joking expletive for a few years.
Sitting at an intersection watching the cross traffic go by, the wife heard my son say “That car looks like rat shit.” She thought that was a bit rude. I thought he was very observant to notice thatthe car looked just like the Transformer named Ratchet.
At my brother’s wedding during the photo session, the (very effeminate, possibly gay) photographer says to me “Ok now, Jack it off!” My immediate reaction was that he was being funny since we had been joking around earlier but he insisted “Come on, Let’s go, jack it off!” I was about to tell him that I thought his humour was really inappropriate when with the help of his charades gesture and everybody yelling at me, I realized he was saying “Jacket”.
I had just moved to Sydney and one of my husband’s circle of friends, a woman, took me on a tour around the neighbourhood.
We passed a bookstore. A few other places. We were talking about nerdy things, comics and roleplaying games and suddenly she said, “Porn store! You’d really enjoy that.”
I gave her an um…sure face. Not wanting to offend, being in a different culture, I thought maybe people were, I dunno, more open about that sort of thing?
She turned around and headed back the other way. We were back at the bookstore. It was called “Corn Stalk”.
Her accent made it sound like ‘porn store’ - we laughed a lot.
Teaching an EFL class, I passed around pictures of different types of homes and asked which they would/wouldn’t want to live in and why. One of them was a concrete tower block, and one girl said she wouldn’t want to live there because of all the semen in the building. We went over this for a while, with me looking baffled.
She meant cement.
One of the bosses of another EFL school, who wasn’t a native English speaker himself, decided to give the students a talk one day. Afterwards they came to me in a group and asked why the boss was so concerned that they should have carriers. Did he mean bags? Was he being environmentally friendly? Some of them held up their reusable bags. Were they that important in England?
He meant careers.
Another student, in a very large class, gave a speech where she kept saying that she hated the fuck you on websites. The other students’ giggles got harder and harder to keep under control as she carried on about fuck you not being helpful, and most people don’t want a fuck you, just a person. Fuck you was not common in her country. I did ask if that was was she meant to say, and she said yes, she’d rather have nothing than fuck you. This could hardly be heard over the laughter at this point. She then called out loudly, looking confused, no fuck you, no fuck you!
She meant FAQ. I bet that mishearing has happened among people who speak English as a first language, too.
Reminds me of the newsman at the radio station I worked at in 1973 (still one of my closest friends today) reading an AP wire story about a Soviet naval ship capsizing. The next line in the story was something to the effect of boats being sent to the area to “pick up all the Russian seamen floating on the ocean.”
He had great difficulty finishing the newscast without totally losing it on the air.
A long time ago, a friend called me up when I had the stereo playing. I told him, “Just a minute. I gotta shut somethin’ off.” He said “I can call back!” I said “No, it’ll just take me a second.”
I shut off the stereo and came back to the phone. “OK, what’s up?” “That was quick,” he said. “I just had to shut something off,” I said. He replied, “Oh, I thought you said you had to shit something awful!”
When I was a bartender at our university pub, a very attractive asian girl came up to the bar, smiled, and politely asked me for a large cock!
I was stunned and the other staff were laughing so I assumed I was being pranked but the girl just stood there smiling and asked again for a large cock.
I guess by the look on my face and my coworkers all laughing, she realized I didn’t understand her, so she eventually pointed to the Coke logo on the drinks menu.
ETA My Economics 100 professor had an awful accent and it was sometimes impossible to discern what he was actually saying. I remember it taking me (and the class) about half a lecture to realize that when he said *Parcheesi *he meant purchases.
My sister was working the ticket window at a movie theater. One of the films being shown was The Color Purple. Big (white) guy walked up and asked for two tickets for “The Colored People.”
To her credit, Sis maintained her composure. Until the guy was gone.
We were at Tallulah Gorge. We had just hiked the trail and came back to rest on the benches up top. A bunch of tourists were walking by. One of them asked “Are there any rest stops along the way?”
My brother said “Mexicans? No, haven’t seen any Mexicans. I don’t know if any Mexicans come here…”
I said “No, he said rest stops!” I told the tourists his hearing wasn’t so good.
