I’ve been hearing this ad on NPR lately… sorry, I mean “underwriters credit” or whatever they call them. It’s for some software they claim will “help everyone in the enterprise work with and understand data”. And while I understand what they actually mean, I like to imagine they’re actually saying they will help everyone in the Starship Enterprise work with and understand Data, the android. That’s what they get for using the buzzword “enterprise” in place of “business” or “company”, I say.
Do you ever do that? Are there any phrases you choose to interpret in a different way from the intended meaning, just because you find it funny?
A podcast I listen to ends with the host listing all their social media handles. The last one is “for all you Tweeters out there,” which I always translate to “all you Tweakers.”
I get annoyed when customers ask for a receipt - because they will always get one, whether they want one or not, and the only reason they don’t have one in front of them is that the printer is still processing it. For this reason, as soon as the card machine goes “beep”, I say:
I’ll make you a receipt.
I know it’s weird, and i could say “I’ll print a receipt”, or “The receipt is printing”, but i like to imagine waving a magic wand and turning them into a piece of paper on the floor.
Darren_Garrison’s comment made me think of something else. My mind automatically reads CBT as cock-and-ball torture. It makes reading about cognitive behavioural therapy much more entertaining.
NPR also used to run a sponsorship announcement from a visiting eldercare service that performed “light housework,” which I always opted to interpret as “lighthouse work.”
There is an animated TV show called “Pokemon Diamond & Pearl”.
The newspaper channel guide lists it as “Pokemon DP”.
That creates some interesting mental imagery.
Whenever I hear the song “Life is a Highway”, my brain twists the lyrics to
Your Hershey Highway,
I want to ride it all night long.
I also think of POS as “piece/pile of shit” rather than “point of sale”, but probably because my wife worked in retail for a number of years and was always complaining about how the POS systems were POSes. (It seems like they would bring in a new system about every four or five years, and the new system was always consistently worse than what it replaced.)
I pretend to panic when I see the word “disrupt” used in a business context. OMG, this new company’s product is disrupting the ______ industry - quick, someone call the police!
Shohei Ohtani is a baseball phenomenon who is both a 100 mph pitcher and leads the league in home runs. He is the modern version of Babe Ruth.
Anyway, he originally hails from Japan, where he played for the Nippon Ham Fighters. Except they don’t “fight ham” - rather, the team are the Fighters, and Nippon Ham is the club name (and derives from a food company).
(this was mistakenly posted to ATMB).