Insane interpretations that you have seen about media?

[dorvann]

There is always this anecdote about a wrong interpretation of a work(credit SciFiSam):

@SciFiSam

I wish I could remember the name of the academic. He wrote about his own mistake in some article I read way back in the 90s.

He had written an entire book based on a mishearing. It was a John Wayne movie, and he thought that Wayne said that the fight between the families was “feudal.”

So he wrote a whole book about how Westerns presented fights between families, and society in general, as feudal, like in the middle ages. He had some good arguments for it, too, and the book was fairly well-received.

Years later he realised that John Wayne hadn’t said feudal at all. He’d said futile. In the UK that’s pronounced /ˈfjuːtʌɪl/, like fyoo-tie (like Thai food) - ul. It’s not very similar to the American pronunciation at all, so it’s an understandable mishearing, but to write an entire book based on one mishearing is pretty unusual. Wayne’s line was a throwaway comment without nearly as much meaning as the academic assigned to it. He had wondered why nobody else had picked up on it, and now he knew.

https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-stories-of-incidents-where-someone-got-the-wrong-end-of-the-stick/849310/12