I wish I could remember the name of the academic. He wrote about his own mistake in some article I read way back in the 90s.
He had written an entire book based on a mishearing. It was a John Wayne movie, and he thought that Wayne said that the fight between the families was “feudal.”
So he wrote a whole book about how Westerns presented fights between families, and society in general, as feudal, like in the middle ages. He had some good arguments for it, too, and the book was fairly well-received.
Years later he realised that John Wayne hadn’t said feudal at all. He’d said futile. In the UK that’s pronounced /ˈfjuːtʌɪl/, like fyoo-tie (like Thai food) - ul. It’s not very similar to the American pronunciation at all, so it’s an understandable mishearing, but to write an entire book based on one mishearing is pretty unusual. Wayne’s line was a throwaway comment without nearly as much meaning as the academic assigned to it. He had wondered why nobody else had picked up on it, and now he knew.
The American pronunciation of missile as missal also sounds a lot like they sent a Catholic book to attack people (they’re homophones in US English, but not in British English), but fortunately people are likely to double check what they heard with that one.
On a less serious point, a friend of mine from Essex (where the accent is similar to London but not exactly the same) was once telling an American bloke we’d just met that she’d recently got a new house. In her accent (and mine sometimes), that’s pronounced like ass, but you draw out the a. He was genuinely baffled about why this woman he barely knew was telling him she’d got a new ass and was really happy that it was so much bigger even though it needed a lot of work. He kept looking down at her backside and saying it looked fine. I probably should have stepped in to explain sooner but I was enjoying the confusion. I didn’t add to it by asking things like whether the plumbing in her “ass” was OK but I really wish I had.