You know, like when you say “Hi” to someone and they respond with “Good”? Share some examples.
Saturday I got into an elevator with two other people (who apparently don’t know each other). Nobody was saying a word. I said “Ever notice how quiet it gets on an elevator?” A woman replied “Oh, I know, it’s because it’s so hot out and everyone is at the pool or shopping or something. I hate this heat.”
It’s amazing how people hear what they want to hear.
I’m partially deaf. This kind of thing happens to me all the time, except I’m the one who doesn’t understand what the other person said.
Yes. Not infrequently, I speak very precisely, and someone who’s not paying attention might get precisely the wrong impression.
Well, from the other end of the problem.
My hearing isnt bad per se, but if someone starts talking to me without me expecting it, all I hear is a charlie brown’s adult waa waaa waaaaa.
If I dont expect or hear the first word right, the rest is likely to be gibberish to me.
Yes. My husband, all the time. He is losing his hearing and will not consider hearing aids of any kind.
Also, just the other day, I was in the gym, which I hate. I was nearing the end of my torture hour, hot, sweaty, tired, and cranky. Some employee approached me and said “How are you?” I answered, “Terrible!” “Oh, good,” she responded, “Would you like to…” “NO!” Presumably she was simply not listening.
Yes, I can’t stand that elevator music.
I’m on the Internet, aren’t I?
Seriously, I see this happen all the time. It happens online and it happens in places with background noise.
One place you can see a lot of this is in loud dance clubs. My wife used to go to these a lot when we were dating and sometimes I’d go with her. She’d lean over and yell in her friend’s ear “We’re thinking of going to the other club now!” and her friend would shake her head, put a hand over her glass and shout back “No more for me, thanks!” Or she’d shout “What do you think about this song?” and her friend would reply, “No, my Mom’s fine!”
Outside the clubs, during normal conversations, they’d insist that they always heard and understood each other when they were clubbing, but I saw first-hand that these claims were…exaggerated, and often each party just responded to whatever she assumed was being said.
I was sitting at a dinner party with two people, one of whom had lost his wife to cancer about six months earlier. The women next to me asked, “What have you been doing since she passed away?”
“Feeling the pain.”
“Inside or outside?”
Me: :dubious:
He said “Both.” She looked confused, and he got up to get a drink. I gave her a questioning look and she said, “Didn’t he just say he was peeling paint?”
Add me to another hard-of-hearing person. It’s often amusing, and I usually realize what I’ve heard isn’t what was said. As an example:
My sister and I were leaving the movie theater parking lot, along with a bunch of other cars. My sister looked down to another row of exiting cars and said “that bastard!” My family just doesn’t use language like that, particularly for something so totally innocuous. I said “I think that’s a little harsh, don’t you?” She said “What? I was asking if that way would be faster.”
StG
I’m not talking so much about being hard of hearing or being in a loud environment and hearing words that rhyme with words that were said. The example I gave in the OP was a comment made, and a response that was completely off course. I can’t possibly see how “Ever notice how quiet it gets on an elevator?” could be misconstrued as “Sure is hot out.” It’s like the woman expected a completely different sentence, and she totally filtered out what was not on her mind.
Having said that, years ago I was getting jiggy with a girlfriend. We had just gotten naked and got into an embrace. She said “Mmm, nunski nunski.” After a few minutes of kissing, I said “Wait, did you just say nunski nunski?” I was puzzled at this new word. “No”, she said. “I said skin on skin.” It became a running joke with us. “Hey baby, how about a little nunski nunski?”
I used to live in China and when I first arrived, I was greeted by a very friendly Chinese lady who spoke perfect English.
Anyway, I was surprised by how little the customs officials asked me. In fact, there was no inspection or questioning other than a brief review of the passport and visa.
When I was first loading my baggage into a van, my Chinese friend said, “So, do you have any questions?”
I said, “Wow, does China have no customs?”
She paused. Then she said, “We have many customs that go back many years.”
I tried to explain, but she was busy helping others. I had been in China less than an hour and I had already had one Chinese person think that “the stupid American” thinks China has no traditions/customs.
I know it’s not quite what the OP was looking for, but it’s definite misunderstanding. 
This is also not quite what the OP was looking for, but there have been many times where at the end of a sales transaction, I am expecting the cashier to say something like “have a nice day” to which I am prepared to reply “you too”.
Sometimes they mix it up on me and say something like “enjoy your meal/drink/purchase”, to which my brain cannot adjust quickly enough, and still commands my mouth to say “you too”. At this point I usually just walk away mentally doing this :smack: rather than try to awkwardly recover.
Comedian Brian Regan does a whole routine about this. “Enjoy your meal!” “You too! Uh, I mean, later, when you get to eat, like, if you get a break or something…”
I always do this when I go to the movies, and the ticket-seller-person or the ticket-taker-person says “enjoy the movie”.
Earier today my co-worker said that a new program he was testing was “a piece”. I thought it was meant to be short for “a piece of cake”, as in easy to use, so I said “Good! Maybe now we can get rid of (other software we’ve been using)”. Turns out it was supposed to be short for “a piece of shit”. He was a bit confused by my response.
Person 1: Is this Wembley?
Person 2: No, it’s Thursday.
Person 3: So am I, let’s go get a drink!
I swear I’m the king of this, my brain is racing as it is. Most conversations between select friends (the ones that operate on the same eerie level as me) and me tend to jump from topic A to topic W in about 3 minutes with all of us following it perfectly and everyone else going. 
Of course, this same racing also causes me to have issues interpreting what people say sometimes*. Oftentimes a conversation will end when I hear someone talk but don’t actually understand the words. It’s hard to explain, ever read a book for a class or something when you didn’t really want to and and then have to read a paragraph again after you realize you have no idea what it actually said? It’s kind of like that. This often ends in me muttering off something related to the topic that’s probably still a non-sequitur and looking mildly ashamed of myself followed by silence and a new topic from one of us.
One happened recently on the phone (though it’s not too funny, I sadly can’t think of any good ones right now):
Friend: Hey can you give me your address (he was coming over to revel in Nostalgia and play Gauntlet Legends for the N64 with me)
Me: Uh, sure where are you? (I thought he said “a drop” meaning pick him up)
Him: Uh… no, I just need your address for my GPS.
He probably thought I meant directions buuut…
*This causes many other issues too, some of which I won’t get into. Let’s just say I ask a lot of questions after/in class because I tend to interpret EVERY possible meaning of a phrase and try to attack it at every angle and associate with everything before I absorb it, and not voluntarily all the time.
Shocker Khan and I were eating dinner at a little dive of a cafe in Edgewater when the following exchange took place:
HN: “Do you want some olives?”
SK: “HAHAHAHAHA! I know!!”
HN: “What? You know what? What are you talking about?”
SK: (water pouring out her nose from laughing so hard) “I know… who… swallows!”
HN: “Jesus, I asked if you wanted olives. Not who swallows.”
Well, I’m sure my students could come up with a long list of incidents. I tend to hear…or half hear some statements from my class, which I tend to re-interpret weirdly sometimes. When I repeat whatever it is that I think I heard, I tend to get horrified, startled, or unbelieving looks from the kids. Just yesterday, someone asked me if my oldest daughter had a Mace can for college. I asked, “Does she have a Mexican what?”
When I read your OP I figured she misinterpreted your sentence as “Ever notice how quiet it gets in the summer?” Her response makes sense that way, and it would only require her to have misunderstood a few words rather than the complete sentence. “Elevator” still doesn’t sound very much like “summer”, though.
I was talking to an ex girlfriend (who also collects toys) and said
“Do you remember Monster In My Pocket?”
“Doc, I don’t want to talk about your penis.”
“No! Monster In My Pocket! The toy line! Those little colorful plastic monsters! Medusa, vampires!”