Pi has to be the best irrational food.
I was going to the store with a companion. The store had signs in the window with products and sale prices.
As we pulled into the parking space, my partner asked, “what’s vine gar?”
mmm
Reminds me of this trick you can pull on people:
“What does m-a-c-c-o-y spell?” MacCoy
“What does m-a-c-d-o-n-a-l-d spell?” MacDonald
“What does m-a-c-h-i-n-e spell?” Uhhh… Mac Hine?
Two UIDs here at obviously intentional: @AnnHedonia and @PaddyO’Furniture.
This is why I CamelCase wherever I can.
Came I Case? Why not Came You Case?
Ask someone to: Spell “roast.” Spell “coast.” Spell “most.”
Then ask them: Spell what you put in a toaster?
Or:
Spell “mop.” Spell “cop.” Spell “hop.”
What do you do at a green light?
Get t-boned by somebody running the very late red.
My wife and I were playing Wordle together. We were down to, I think, our last guess and we had de_ut. No idea what the middle letter was out of the ones left, so as a wild guess we chose ‘b’ and solved it: ‘debut’. We both looked at each other and said ‘de-butt’? What’s it mean? Never heard of it…
Then we both did a facepalm and said “ohhhhhh…debut as in ’de-bue’. We both knew what the word meant and how it was pronounced, but seeing it out of context like that threw us for a loop for a minute 
Speaking of which …
A friend (really; it wasn’t me) was once playing Scrabble w his wife. They did this often & were well-matched.
She adds “penis” to the board.
Of course he’s looking at the board upside down and protests “There’s no such word as ‘penn iss’. I appeal to the dictionary.”
With her wicked grin she says “Are you suuuurrrre?” as she slooowly rotates the board his way.
.
Speaking of Scrabble, Jon Carroll (another former Chron columnist) recounted a few Scrabble plays with his wife. She sets down four tiles, and claims her score: A, C, H, and E. “Ache”, she said. He plays a single tile: D. “Ached”, he said, explaining he no longer aches, but he did ache, so he ‘ached’. She was dubious, but allowed it. Then she played two more tiles: R and E. “I ached again. I re-ached.” He grabs for the dictionary, intent on proving her wrong. Much to his surprise (and both of their chagrin), “REACHED” is definitely in the dictionary.
Speaking of, …yes, Scrabble is a game like my Wordle story, where words can present without any context in which to recognize them for a moment.
My wife told me a story of playing Scrabble with a friend before we started dating, who spelled ‘ton’. My wife said "what is ‘ton’ (pronouncing it ‘tahn’)? Her friend looked at her strangely and said “it’s pronounced ‘tuhn’-- 2000 pounds”.
We play Scrabble fairly regularly. We play slow games in front of the fire in Winter-- we don’t rush each other, and have conversations in between moves. Once during a game my wife asked me “can there be more than one Heaven?” I replied, “interesting philosophical question. I think there are some religions that believe…” She interrupted me to say “‘Heaven’ is a word on the board, dumbass-- I was wondering if I could add an ‘S’ to it”.
Oh heavens to Betsy, of course she can.
Which demonstrates just how much our brains are context-driven. Absent context, nearly nothing makes immediate sense.
When I was 7 and reading astronomy, I thought “sidereal” was pronounced “side real” and it was something like surreal. Like another reality alongside this one. It gave me an eerie feeling.
This is MPSIMS, but…
I think I have related this tale before: I mamaged at senior school (and late junior school) the speed read.
I didn’t do a course or anything, I just started parseing several lines at a time, and something in my brain put them into order. So I could read phemonenally fast.
But I felt I was missing nuance and the kind of pondering over a phrase that often makes a book worthwhile, while I was getting the “Reader’s Digest” simplified version, not the real value of the text.
So I learned to read upside-down. This slowed me for a month or two, but the human mind is irritatingly malleable, and soon I was speed reading upside down.
This had a fortunate side affect, though.
I was not the best behaved student at school (boarding school) and when I got called into the office, I was never too sure which behaviour I was supposed to be defending - I typically had three to five offences at any time.
Being able to read upside-down gave me the time to generate the excuse (in my mind) to the accusation even before my house-master had finished his preamble.
I also play Scrabble upside-down, to the chagrin of both my long-term exs
Sorta similar …
I too tried the self-taught speed reading and had the same “reader’s digest” / gist-only feeling. I never went so far as to speed read upside down. But …
One of my first jobs was being a lab helper at the computer lab at the local junior college I attended while in high school. This was in the days of punch cards and big printouts on the wide green & white striped paper.
My job was to babysit the card reader & line printer and to help students debug their programs. So I’d be sitting at my little desk/table with them across from me. Naturally it was best for them to have the printout facing them. So I’m reading their program upside down. Which actually helped me to see what it said, not what they intended it to say. Made debugging easier, not harder. At least once I learned to read upside down.
My penmanship was awful. Always was, still is. I gave up on cursive forever at about age 17, as soon as I had the choice. But in that job I learned to print upside down about as well and as fast as I could right side up. Not pretty, but plenty readable. So I’d be making updates or comments on their printouts that were right side up for them. Haven’t needed or practiced that skill in a long time.
Hell, I barely use a pen at all any more except to sign a credit card slip. And those are increasingly tap-only or sign the screen with a fingertip. For which I use a large X.
Oh yeah … I did not attend boarding school but I was not very well-behaved either. Smart kid in dumb school leads to extreme boredom leads to … trouble. So I sure experienced the fun of going to see the disciplinarian with no idea which recent crime I was in for.
I routinely pronounce words differently just to slap my brain out it’s context or other kinds of ordinary stupor.
Place the accent on a different syllable. Give the vowels and their mingled pairings a workout.
It’s a little quirk of mine.
I only do this around people who are aware of and also enjoy this kind of quirkiness.