When I was in high school, a girl told me about an exchange she had with her father when she was about five years old:
“Dad, what’s a tuba?”
“The square root of a fourba.”
Then one day, in a fourth-grade math lesson, she had to burst out laughing.
… :smack:
The jingle for Kay Jewelers goes “Every Kiss begins with Kay.”
I thought is was just your average lame slogan meaning you need to buy someone diamonds to get them to kiss you.
One day it finally dawned on me and I yelled out: OH! every Kiss begins with ‘K’ !!
Unfortunately, I was in the MIDDLE of a kiss at the time, and GonzoGal won’t let me forget it… :smack:
Circle K, the convinience store chain; it’s name means ‘okay.’ I will not tell you how I was before I finally thought to question why a store would be named something as odd as Circle K.
I just recently made the connection between the comic strip character Sally Forth and the idiomatic expression of the same name.
In a different vein, I was born in a small gold mining town in the Sierra Nevada mountains. (No, really.) My dad owned a restaurant/bar for part of the time we were there, and it was called The Ore House. I didn’t get the double meaning there until my early twenties.
It was several years after I first saw the “Flaming Homer” episode of the Simpsons before I realized that “Flaming Homer” and “Flaming Moe” are both supposed to sound like “Flaming Homo.”
Now I can only sit around and wonder what else those sneaky Simpsons writers have slipped past me.
Well, let’s see. I had owned, and frequently listned to, Deep Purple’s Perfect Strangers album for about three years when, one day, in the middle of the song “Knocking at Your Back Door”, I heard the line…
“So we put her on the hit list/
of a common, cunning linguist/
a master of many tongues”
and realized it was a reference to
ORAL SEX!!!
Also, I saw the first Batman movie about three years before I saw Enter the Dragon for the first time, so when I was watching Bruce Lee’s nunchucka-fu with the bad guys deciding they don’t want to mess with this guy and running away, I was reminded of the opening scene of Batman. Then I remembered that Enter the Dragon had been made first…
This is also a reference to Alice in Wonderland. At one point there’s a bottle of liquid that reads, “Drink Me” and a cake that reads, “Eat Me”. One made her big, the other small (I think).
On the jewish thing (something I hadn’t a clue about until much later) after seeing The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine countless times on TV since the 70s, only last year did it suddenly occurred to me what the, “Are you blue-ish? You don’t look blue-ish” line meant…
Mel Brooks did something similar in Spaceballs. The lead character, Lonestar, has just rescued the Princess of the planet Druid, and she is in the back of his spaceship loudly complaining about the accomodations. Lonestar says to his partner (whose name I forget - played by John Candy), “Oh great! I’m stuck with a Druish Princess!” His partner replies, “Funny, she doesn’t look Druish…”
Id heard some joke when I was very young where a lady called her boyfriend Drambuie, because hes a fancy liquor.
I finally got it about a year ago, working in a liquor store.
You broke your silence just to post that?
Class. 
Really? People in your area never say stuff like “Wally the Weakling is no match for Superman”? Because that’s exactly the context and meaning in which it’s used in that joke…
I suppose this would fall in the “and other things” category referenced in the thread title…
While I was a sophomore in high school, I was fairly good friends with a girl who was reputed to be the class slut. (Turns out there were multiple claimants for that one.) Anyway, one day, she turned to me after class and asked me, "Is the second date too soon to have sex with someone?)
I must’ve mumbled something nonsensical in reply. However, five years later, I suddenly realized what the response should have been:
“I dunno; go out with me a couple of times, and I’ll tell you.”
I did get the chance to tell her this, a couple of years after I thought of it. She was quite amused. (whew!)
Actually , I remember this as :
Eeby Deeby,
Chili beaney
The Masters are about to speak!
And it took me a long time to realize , since this exchange between B & R was always before a commercial break , that the Masters were their advertisers!
(Please correct me if I’m mistaken about any of this.)
[nitpick]
That’s planet Druidia.
[/nitpick]
off to hang my head in shame…
It was well after I first read Alan Moore’s Watchmen that i realized that the character Rorschasch literally saw everything in Black and White, and that his mask (with its symmetrical pattrns in black and white fluid that never mixed to form gray) was symbolic of this.
Sorry, but “Spirits” is correct. And it is “Eeny Meanie”.
from Come Together:
For the longest time, I thought that line simply meant that jokey-type people are less inhibited, and thus do what they please.
About a year ago I realized there’s also the implication that, just as the joker in a pack of cards can be any card, the person in question can do what he please.
I remember back in grade school reading class we were doing the “read a paragraph outloud” rounds. I came across the word hors d’oeuvres and without batting an eye read it as “whores-dee-oh-vores”.
The teacher laughed and said “or-derves”. I had no idea what she was talking about or what she was refering to. I looked at my other classmates and they shrugged and gave me puzzled looks as well.
I just thought “that was weird” and kept on reading.
I LOVE Life of Brian …
For the longest time, I thought it was “Incontinentia Bucket”. Which made no sense. Then I got the DVD, put on the captions, and it was “Incontinentia Buttocks”. Which I still didn’t get. Until a few months ago,and I now feel like a total doofus for not getting it in the first place.
Biggus Dickus I get, though…
Well, it works better as a verbal joke. Try saying it put loud instead of reading it.
DD