Erm.. Did I Really hear that?

[richardandtracy]

I thought I'd share a few sillies that make normal comprehension founder and mental processes run into a brick wall. You may enjoy them.

I have a native English speaker colleague who's grasp of the English language is tenuous at best, and he's the best source of oddities, but by no means alone.

When trying to think of a popular song he remembered the title 'Mountain Deep, River High'.
Then when you get diverted by an irrelevant thought it's a 'Black Herring'.
And fish 'bob along the bottom' of the sea rather than swim.
He declared that the great house at Port Lympne (pronounced the same way as the word 'Limb') has a large number of 'Painted Muriel's' around the house. No, Tim, that would be a deviant practice, there are 'painted murals'. You don't accost a random woman called 'Muriel' and paint all over her skin just because she's at Port Lympne.

My aunt many years ago got really excited about her newly installed 'seated himming pool'. Left us somewhat in the dark until we realised you swim in it and it's nice and warm.

Once, when kids, my brother was getting really niggled because he kept loosing at cards, so when he was out of the room I fixed the pack so he couldn't loose with the next hand. When he returned I solemnly told him 'If you don't win, you've got some answers to question'.

A project manager at a customer company is a real Essex boy, and has his own, unique, version of English. He never 'documents' a change, he always 'documentates' it. A container going through testing is always 'Instrumentated' rather than 'instrumented'.
When reading out a French label on one of our boxes he said 'Knee Paz March-er', with none of the French pronunciation implicit in 'Ne pas marcher'. And in Spain he ordered a 'San Mig-u-el' beer, pronouncing every anglicised syllable.

I was watching the BBC 9 O'clock news on the day that Jan Leeming declared to the nation that a 'Hyperdeemic Nurdle' had been used in a crime.

That's just a few. Can anyone else recall any things that made you think 'Did I Really hear that?'?

Regards,

Richard.

[wendywombat]

Erm! I'm one of those 'odd' people who has to make up words.
I use desecrated coconut for instance. Having lived in Bristol I got used to odd language. People there had varicosus veins and prostrates.
All part of the richness of vocabulary

[richardandtracy]

I love 'desecrated coconut'! Dear me.

Regards,

Richard.

[CuriousKitty]

It's kind of a PNW thing here in the US I think, but we tend to slur "yup" and "hello" together into "yello" kind of. Had a guy come up and make a remark about uneducated responses and how white people say "yellow" when answering the phone (it's more of a phone thing than a physical conversation thing I've noticed) and that's when I realized I do that and tamped down my smart ass response about being educated. It's an informal response I give when I know the caller ID as it is. I certainly don't answer that way at work!

[Mabel Figworthy]

I think most languages have things like these, people pronouncing things wrong or, er, differently . I certainly recognise it in Dutch!

Some of it is "folk etymology", when people who are unfamiliar with a word try to make sense of what it means by giving it a similar-sounding but more descriptive name - in English, asparagus was often known as sparrow grass.