Sunday, November 18, 2007

some Sunday links

1. Malcolm is hosting a YouTube video of Richard Feynman. This was the first time I had ever heard the man speak.

2. Rory sends me a link to every Star Wars geek's dream: Wookieepedia. The entry on Darth Vader is long. I'm pressed for time and can't finish reading it right now.

3. Elisson links to a hilarious YouTube example of mondegreens. This had me in stitches. You may not have heard the term mondegreen before (I sure hadn't), but you doubtless know the phenomenon: a mondegreen is a linguistic mishap in which the hearer of an utterance accidentally (or sometimes willfully) hears something completely different from what was intended by the utterer.

Examples: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" misheard as "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy," or the Korean mishearing (probably deliberate, since Koreans joke about this) of "Merci beaucoup" as "myeol-ch'i bokkeum," a fish dish. My buddy Dominique, who speaks a wee bit of German, once offered me a twisted riff off the German "Bitte schön" by saying, "My bite is schön." The French word "bite" (pronounced "beat") means "dick," so Dominique is saying, "My dick is beautiful." Too much information, Domi.


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1 comment:

Sean said...

I love Mondegreens and wrote about them the first time I discovered them as well. http://eflgeek.com/index.php/eflgeek/comments/the-red-and-the-mondegreen/ got a christmas one up on that entry.