Mushed Gay Tears Oranged

Little Miss Farty and BF went to see The Foo Fighters last night. BF, being a drummer, was over the moon that he even got to shake hands with Taylor Hawkins, or as LMF called him, Trey Parker. It's an easy mistake to make, and it leads nicely into today's post.

When I was wee, my mum used to put the clothes to dry in the "airm cupboard". I had mental images of airms, or arms, being stacked up alongside the clothes. As you do when you're five. I was quite disappointed to learn, later in life, that it was in fact called the airing cupboard. Boo!

Apparently this sort of thing is sometimes known as a mondegreen, after the tragic historical character Lady Mondegreen. Well, it is if you believe that mangy dog, the pet of a million flies.

New Scientist recently mentioned how a dragon drop interface for a new program turned out to be a misheard transcription and should have been the more prosaic "drag and drop". (On the subject of dragons, I now hear that Welsh Dragon Sausages only may contain traces of dragon. What's the world coming to?)

And I could swear I heard The X Factor referred to as a "talent show". Shome mishtake shurely?

The British Citizenship Test certainly has some odd questions in it. How much more interesting would it be, though, if Johnny Foreigner had to translate the story of Ladle Rat Rotten Hut into proper English to gain citizenship?

I doubt if even the best supercomputer could manage that, it's notoriously hard to get a machine to recognise speech.

I wonder if there's an expression for when the reverse happens? It was only after Frasier finished airing (see what I did there?) that I saw Jane "Daphne" Leeves reveal, in an interview, that she'd set up a production company called Bristol Cities. No-one in Merka would ever get the joke - it's Cockernee rhyming slang for a word beginning with T. Until that moment, although I'd heard - and even used - the word "Bristols" for decades, I'd simply never twigged its derivation.

--Dr Angus McFarty, C.O.S., L.Gem, Iceberg & Webb's Wonder.
(I've got lettuce after my name)