The spat106 short longform #18

Misreading things

Within the written language you can often read things the way they are not at all intended. For instance the first series of Survivor NZ had ended, so there finally was a conclusion of who managed to survive a week in Gore. The Stuff article said “NZ’s first sole survivor has been crowned.” However much like the people reading the newsletter now, I read the word sole like exactly like the Samoan word. I did ask people to retweet the tweet about this if they had also read the word in the same way and got a few retweets so I knew I wasn’t the only one.

There are other times where things are read the way they aren’t meant to be and a lot of the time it is because the correct capitalisation isn’t used. The classic one is Help Uncle Jack off the horse, which if the capitals aren’t used will be help uncle jack off the horse which means completely a different thing. But in both ways there is assistance being requested and it would be rude not to help.

A victim of having people often misreading him was Professor X. Whenever he wrote a letter or email signed off with Professor X at the end, people were thinking he was just being arrogant by calling himself Professor and then thought he was trying to soften this arrogance by using X as a sign for a kiss. They replied, “Why you sending a kiss at the end of your correspondence? We’re not that familiar with you!” and then he replied, “That’s my name idiot, what do you think X-Men stands for, kiss men? Come on idiot.” To avoid this situation he consequently signed off emails with Professor Charles Xavier but some people who received that thought this meant Professor Charles was kissing a guy named avier. For those people who thought that way Professor X had to clarify that he wasn’t trying to create a bit of X-Men erotic fan fiction.

The aural equivalent of misread quotes is misheard sayings and the best ones are the misheard lyrics to some songs. My personal favourite is k.d lang’s Constant Craving, no matter how many times I hear it, it always sounds like “God send gravy” to me. Then the whole backstory occurs in my mind, is k.d. that religious? Instead of asking for world peace or to cure the ills of her fellow men and women, why is the request for gravy the utmost priority for her? I don’t care how good this gravy is surely she could get it herself, there must be some type of grocery store close to the recording studio. And anyway if for some reason she can’t get out of the recording studio, there must be an assistant there that could get her the gravy while they are out doing their usual coffee run. But I think k.d, short for Kevin Durant, doesn’t trust anyone in the recording studio, that’s why her plea to get some gravy is only directed at God. Her mistrust in the recording studio workers is justified however because they changed the title of the song from God send gravy to Constant Craving. They could have at least respected her a little bit by changing the title of the song to Constant Craving for Gravy.