“It’s dead, Jim.”
And our point is that doesn’t make any fucking sense.
“No thanks, I already have a pet goose.”
“No thanks, I prefer spandex pants.”
“No thanks, I just had a hot dog on the way here.”
How do you get from point A to point B? How does one mishear “hearing aid” as “new dentist”?
One doesn’t, unless one is profoundly hard of hearing, as this woman apparently was. She was so hard of hearing that a) the doctor felt compelled to offer her a hearing aid, and b) she took the few garbled sounds she could make out and made a guess that he was recommending a new dentist. That’s how bad her hearing was.
See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdvZiRQ8r1Q
Anyway, I have one that wasn’t particularly epic, but it was funny at the time, and you wouldn’t have to be deaf for it to happen. I had a friend who was starting a catering business, and I was helping her set up for her first big event. She had been told she could use the kitchen on site, but when she got there, she wasn’t allowed in. We had to set up a makeshift prep area in an outbuilding. So everything was a mess: we had no oven, no sink, no work surfaces, and all of the food and supplies were piled on a few folding tables. She was running around frantically trying to arrange some trays of hors d’oeuvres, when suddenly she heard me yell (or so she thought), “Oh, Jesus!” Without even turning around, she sighed and said, “What? What is it now?” After a confused second, the light went on, and I smiled and pointed to the assortment of brie, cheddar, swiss and so forth that I had just found, that we hadn’t been able to locate earlier. “No, not ‘Jesus’, ‘the cheeses’!”
Mother is quite deaf, and once when 3 of we four siblings were sitting on her patio, she brought out a lovely home made cheese ball. We were talking about our missing sib, and my sister said “She call?” and Mother said “Oh yes, Cheese Ball!!”
Forevermore, my sister who missed the get together is Cheese Ball.
Here’s a bilingual one:
At my office in Tokyo, we sometimes mix English words within Japanese sentences and vice-versa during conversation. In my early years, this made for some strange misunderstandings.
One day during winter, I enter my office and take off my heavy coat. Underneath I am wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt, then my Japanese co-worker comes in. She sees me and says, “JpnDude, you’re HAHN-SOH-DE today.” HAHN-SO-DE (半袖 - はんそで) means “short sleeves”.
Naturally, I heard it as “JpnDude, you’re handsome today.” DOH!
Roommate, making toast: “I usually take the toast out right before the dawn.”
Me: “Wait, what? You cook your toast overnight?”
Confusion. Realization that “before dawn” was actually “before it’s done.”
A while back when I was at a friends house and we were ready to go out. I really don’t know why I jumped to the conclusion I did.