It’s pronounced “chokes-on-dick”.
One more ginger confession and some input oh “sherbert” for those still going down those roads.
I had to have been in my 20’s or 30’s before I really knew that the ginger in ginger ale was the same as the ginger in ginger snaps and gingerbread. It took my actually dealing with ginger root and using it in some wok and hibachi recipes before I had the “aha moment” at last. I guess it was one of those many things I wasn’t curious about until it hit me in the head.
As for “sherbert” (which is how I and most everybody I knew) said it, I suspect (don’t know) it could be tied to the familiarity of Herbert (as in Hoover who was still a common enough topic on his own, and who had not just a few namesakes) and how nobody would even dare to pronounced it “Herbet” (at least I never heard it said that way). Probably bullshit, but there you go. See if older people you know have similar versions. If they do, it’s probable that as Herbert faded from the scene, so did “sherbert.”
I was grown (or at least in my late teens) before I ever heard “cock” referring to a male genital. I may have even read it before hearing it. And cocksucker and cuntlapper were just different names for folks who got their jollies that way. I still have to check the context before allowing cock to substitute for the dozen or so more common terms for the penis. Dick wins by a mile, followed by prick, peter, willy, dong, schlong, johnson, and at least a few more before cock even shows up. And before you need to point it out, I know that a cock is a male bird.
[off topic apology]
I’m a SherbeRt transgressor. But I plead the “Buffalo” argument which is as follows:
Yes, I know that they are bison not buffalo. But if all of us are calling them buffalo then they are buffalo!
[/off topic appology]
shhhhh - Is that one of Opalcat’s ninja hitmen kreeping up on me?
Opal?
Is that you? For real?
If it is, consider yourself whistled at very appreciatively!
Not something I got recently, but anyway… When I was a child, I asked my mother what margarine was made of, and she told me, “oil.” I spent way too many years mildly freaked out by the thought that I was spreading a petroleum byproduct on my toast.
Many of these are things that had not previously occurred to me, but I think I’ll try to save a little face, not to mention bandwidth, and not list them.
That said, my most recent one was from the Men at Work song Down Under. There’s a line that goes “He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich”. I had never heard of vegemite until I started hanging around the SDMB, so I had no idea what he could be singing. I’d just sing along and slur the words so they came out sounding like “he just smiled and gave me a bite of my sandwich” which makes no sense at all.
Also, rapport was a word I was familiar with from books, but I didn’t know it was the same word as the spoken word “rapoor”. I must have been about 22 when I finally figured it out. I had to write up a report for my job and submit it to my manager. Yeah, I publicly mangled the word in writing. My co-workers ribbed me about it for the remainder of my employment there.
Yeah, that’s me. Thank you 
I didn’t just get this recently, it was quite a few years ago, but one day I realized that in 19th century English literature (Dickens, Trollope, etc.) the word “gaol” is the same as “jail” - pronounced the same, just an archaic spelling. The sad thing is that I knew that a ‘gaol’ was a prison, but I thought it was pronounced “gall” (as in gall bladder) rather than ‘jail.’
In It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Linus writes a letter to the “Great Pumpkin”* telling him not to be despondent that Santa Claus is more well-known than he is: “Being number two, perhaps you try harder.”
It took me years to realize that line was a play on Avis Rent-A-Car’s famous “We’re number two, but we try harder” slogan.
*Schulz always put “Great Pumpkin” in quotation marks in the strip, so I assume that is the proper form.
You have just blown my mind, sir.
“Gaol” is not entirely archaic: Prison - Wikipedia
:smack: Huh. How about that. I’m normally good at spotting these things.
I assumed this to mean a bowel movement…was Charles Schulz enough of a rapscallion to have meant that?
I guess it’s time for me to have my “ridiculously obvious stuff you just got” moment. As soon as you explain it to me.
-FrL-
No, I’m pretty sure Schulz was not that much of a rapscallion, and that the intended gag is the Avis slogan (which I’ll never be able to look at the same way again).
I had a roommate in college who was a biology major. At one point we got into a discussion about mammals in which he expressed surprise that a giraffe was a mammal.
Me: … What did you think it was?
Him: I don’t know … like a horse?
Me: A horse is a mammal!! Wait. Wait. Name some mammals for me.
Him: Uh … dolphin, human, platypus …
Maybe not so much a “pun” as a double-meaning. Crickets are bugs like beetles, but for a guy from England, cricket is also a sport. This is John’s explanation *John: Well, I remembered the other day when somebody mentioned the Crickets at a press conference. I’d forgotten all about that. I was looking for a name like the Crickets that meant two things, and from Crickets I got to Beatles. *
In 1990, Paul clarified When we first heard “Crickets”… Back in England, there’s the game cricket, and we knew about the little chirpy, hoppity-goes-to-town type crickets. So, we thought they’d been brilliant, they’d really got this amazing double meaning name, of like the game and the bug. We thought this was brilliant, we thought, well, we’ve got to do this. So John and Stuart came up with this name that the rest of us hated, this Beatles, spelled with an “a.” We said, “Why?” They said, “Well, you know, this is a bug, and its got a double meaning, just like the Crickets.” We were influenced in many, many ways.
Quotes from here
You got me, Superman. This the first in the thread where I hadda pulla Johnny Carson. I had always heard ‘Gay-Ohl’ in my head, and never said it aloud.
A couple of weeks ago my son called and asked me to hang on to Lost on my DVR because he had missed it. He came over and while watching it mentioned that Fisher Stevens had enjoyed a nice little career, and that he was a little surprised that the brownface role had apparently done him no harm. “What brownface role?”, says I, and he says, “Didn’t you see Short Circuit ?”. Well, I had HBO in the 1980s, and could hardly have missed it, the freaking thing was ubiquitous.
Fisher Stevens played Benjamin Jabituya in Short Circuit. I must be the only one in North America who didn’t know this.