That reminds me of another one. I always thought it was really weird that I’ve been in multiple grocery stores that had an employee named Emma Dee. It’s just not the type of name you’d expect to be common in Minnesota. And whoever this Emma Dee was, she must have worked at the service desk, because you’d hear cashiers paging her all the time.
One day I finally realized that it wasn’t Emma Dee they were paging. It was MOD, which stood for “Manager of the Day.” (Or maybe Manager On Duty?)
Someone on another board I read happens to have pet snakes. So she perked up her ears when she overheard a commercial touting pharmaceutical remedies for “reptile dysfunction” …
I love it. I should have gotten some of that stuff for my iguana. He must have been the most dysfunctional reptile on the planet.
Amazing that an actual alien would take a raft to the US of A!! Whoa, how weird is that??!!
Not to mention that the alien in question would have a common latino surname. Huh.
Thinking back, the Elian Budweiser “WASSSUPP” commercial parody was the best.
While I was a kid, my dad had something that my brother and I called a “radio alarm saw” that he’d always be cutting wood with. It was a big thing on a stand and we’d often use it as a landmark, i.e, “the basketball is over next to the radio alarm saw.” It wasn’t until I was an adult that it dawned on me that it was actually a radial arm saw.
Other confusions:
Alzheimer’s disease = Old timers disease
scapegoat = escape goat
I also got excited when the power went off and my dad told me he was going to take a look at the transformer. I was expecting a robot that could turn into things. I got a little dissapointed when it was just a can-looking thing that didn’t even change form.
My childhood friend’s parents got divorced, and after it happened he told me “she lives in grease now.”
That one took me a while.
Sigh. I downloaded an underground rap album recently, burned it on a CD, and popped it in the next time I got in the car; in the intro track, the rapper says “My name is HAL 9000. I became optional in 1999 in Cleveland, Ohio.” or something like that.
Optional? Come the fuck on. I threw that shit right out the window.
Yep, that’s what I thought the first time I heard that phrase in Bostonian, too. FWIW.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
There is an expression which means I want to deal with the top man, not some half baked youth with no authority.
“I want to speak to the organ grinder, not the monkey”
I suppose (now) that it must come from the days of travelling fairs, back in the long distant past where people played music on an organ and that a monkey danced to the tune and you threw money.
For years I thought it was the angle grinder.
Which really makes no sense whatsoever, because I know that an angle grinder is an inanimate tool, rather than a person. I can only imagine that because I had never heard of an organ grinder and couldn’t make any sense of it, I had subconsciously transmogrified it in my head to a term I had heard.
Imagine a monkey with an angle grinder. Scary. I bet those gorillas could have made use of a platoon of those, in their warfare. 
My husband’s aunt was once going on about how one of her young nephews was totally obsessed with power ranges. And I’m thinking, “What, the kid’s an aficionado of electric stoves? Huh?” Finally I twigged - Power Rangers. And I felt like a “wicked retahd.”
For my entire childhood, I couldn’t figure out why Puff the Magic Dragon brought Jackie ceiling wax, or what exactly that substance might be (makes your ceiling nice and shiny, perhaps?).
Ooh, me too! I’d heard of floor wax…
A long time ago, MAD Magazine ran a piece illustrating children’s interpretations of news headlines. One of them, IIRC, was pretty much this.
**Fetchund **and I make a point of telling each other what we heard when we know we’ve misunderstood something. We gotten into some serious giggling fits over a few. Our favorite:
She said: It’s as good an explanation as any (or something close to that)
I heard: Gouda, sex, and Becks
We thought that would make a great date. Needless to say, “gouda, sex, and Becks” is now how we respond to any situation that might vaguely call for “it’s as good an explanation as any.”
I can’t be the only one who used to wonder who Richard Stands was, am I? All through first and second grade I used to wonder when we’d finally learn about such an important historical figure, but we never did.
Even in Boston, wouldn’t there be an i or an e after the p?
And since P as a letter is pronounced with a long ‘e’ sound afterwards…
I’m not from Boston. I’m not even American but when I said the letters out loud, I could hear a sort of strangulated “pierced ears”.
Pee ess dee ess
Years ago, I was with my then-girlfriend, and we had just removed our clothes and got into a very sexual embrace. She said “Mmm, nunski nunski!”
We made out for a minute or two before I asked “Did you just say nunski nunski?”
“No”, she said, “I said ‘skin on skin.’” From that point on we always called it nunski nunski.
Warning: If your pet snake stays straight and rigid for over four hours, see your vet immediately.
It has priapisssssssssssm.
In Russia, penis licks you!
“Five more seconds, and I’m leaving!”
“What did you just say?!”
“I said, ‘Five more seconds, and I’m leaving.’”
“Oh.”
“Wait, what did you think I said?”
“I thought you said, 'Earn more sessions by sleeving.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know! That’s why I asked!”
-Roxanne
Ah, okay, though when trying to suggest a pronunciation we generally do include vowels when they’re supposed to be there, regardless of if you hear the vowel sound aloud like with P, B, or the American Z. Going for Boston-speak I would render it as closer to “pisteahs” anyway.