Now I get it!
It probably wasn’t until I was 25 years old that I realized that Pink Floyd was a band, and not a guy named Pink. I also thought Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan were individuals named Fleetwood and Steely, respectively. I recall the moment when, in casual conversation with friends, my ignorance on all three of these counts was fully disclosed, and it’s those moments of my adult life—moments when my fundamental assumptions about the universe were revealed, in public, to be false—which constitute some of my worst nightmares.
I don’t know what makes those moments so painful for me. Perhaps its the realization that, for example, some guy named Pink wasn’t, in fact singlehandedly breaking The Wall, and that for my entire life I carried a misguided pretentiousness about an American culture which valorized a burnout named Pink. These moments aren’t about exposing some form of misunderstanding; they’re about making it clear to someone who matters that you just didn’t get it.
You know these moments. A friend of mine, 34 years of age, found out only a few weeks ago that the term is “Flamenco Dancing”—not “Flamingo Dancing”. I once had to return a student’s paper because it used the phrase “for all intensive porpoises” instead of “for all intents and purposes.” Ouch.
I really think that someone, perhaps here at etherfarm, should compile a list of these experiences. If I can save even one person this kind of embarrassment, I’d consider my karmic debts completely paid off.
I’ll start here:
In a film class I taught a few years ago, I brought up Fellini. I can’t remember how Fellini came up—it was a statement as banal as “Fellini is great.” This caused a student towards the back of the room to chuckle. I asked the girl what was so funny—not in a disciplinary way, mind you—I really did want to know if there was something suspect about my opinions on Fellini, or if there was something askew in my reference to him.
When asked to explain her outburst, the girl got flustered. After some persuasion, she stumbled through an explanation: “There’s a guy named after…well …isn’t…um …isn’t Fellini…you know …isn’t it…”
I realized where she was going, and a wave of guilt for asking her to explain washed over me. I began blushing for her. It was too late.
She finished, “isn’t it another word for blowjob?”
And of course the whole class erupted in laughter. They didn’t stop for a long time, and in this girl’s eyes I saw Pink Floyd. I tried really hard not to laugh, but the idea of someone “performing Fellini” was far too funny, and in the process I snorted so hard it hurt.
I really wanted another student to explain the difference between fellatio and Fellini. So I asked, “someone want to tell her?”
The class settled down somewhat and someone next to her said, “You’re talking about fellatio.”
I thought, “OK, move on like nothing happened.” No such luck.
The gentleman doing the explaining continued, “We’re talking about Fellini, who I think was named after a type of pasta.”
Sadly, he wasn’t joking.
So fess up. Catastrophic public epiphanies?
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21 responses
tween
Comment posted at 16:03 on Thursday, July 17, 2003
For a long time I thought that the phrase prima donna was actually pre-madonna. I knew what it meant. I think i would have been able to use the phrase correctly as long as I was not pressed to spell it. I did however spend a lot of time contemplating the etymology of the phrase. My mom used the phrase so it never really occurred to me that it had anything to do with the pop star. I sincerely thought that it must have had something to do with acting like you came before the blessed virgin. It is also important to point out that I had about 6 semesters of college Italian under my belt and it still took me a couple of years to figure it out.
I once saw a book called something like “ ‘scuse me while I kiss this guy” that was a compendium of misunderstood lyrics.
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poog
Comment posted at 17:11 on Thursday, July 17, 2003
There was the time I pronounced manure MAN-yer, because I knew what man-OO-er was but thought it was a different word for the same thing.
There was the (female) friend of mine in high school who somehow got the idea that “to castrate meant “to strangle” and ended up screaming in the middle of the quad at lunchtime, when I mock-choked her during some silly horsing around, “Don’t castrate me! Don’t castrate me!”
I’m sure I have more.
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Comment posted at 08:35 on Friday, July 18, 2003
This reminds me of a scene from the movie “Back to The Future”, where Marty McFly (Michael J. fox) wonders why the young version of his mom (Lea Thompson) kept calling him “Calvin”. When pressed as to why the reference, she mutters, “well isn’t Calvin your name? It’s all over your underwear”…
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Comment posted at 09:20 on Friday, July 18, 2003
i will now confess something to resonance that has secretly embarrassed me for nigh on ten years. the setting is a rural town not far from the city where we went to high school together; we are there on a weekend fishing trip (my first and, thank the almighty, last).
having eaten a leisurely lunch, we head back towards the car, and conversation turns to music.
resonance: “blah blah blah peter gabriel blah blah blah.”
me: “what did you just say about peter gabriel?”
resonance: “blah blah sound engineering, blah skillful, blah creative blah original, blah.”
me: “i hate peter gabriel. i can’t BELIEVE you like peter gabriel. that’s the worst music ever! i thought you had taste in music man. this is impossible.”
as it happens, i had never heard of peter gabriel until that very moment. i was, however,
very familiar with peter cetera.
(turns out i really like peter gabriel—-every time resonance brought this conversation up subsequently, i would heatedly deny that it occurred.)
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selenium
Comment posted at 10:37 on Friday, July 18, 2003
hey jon
notice you were at D E Shaw. do you by any chance know Joss Raines (London)? just a long-shot.
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Comment posted at 14:51 on Friday, July 18, 2003
Jon, all those Peter musicians are the same.
There’s a closet Peter Cetera fan in all of us, you shifty little bastard. 
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flash
Comment posted at 21:34 on Saturday, July 19, 2003
As far as bands go, there is always Jethro Tull.
I took a class called Writing: The Genre and, although I knew what genre was, I’d never seen it in writing. I kept saying it like it’s spelled (JEN-REE). Thankfully, this never came up in class until the second to last class when the teacher said something to the effect of “… and that’s why this class is called ‘Writing: The Genre’, because…”.
Man did I feel like a complete idiot.
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Comment posted at 00:49 on Sunday, July 20, 2003
Shit. Jethro Tull is another one of those bands I thought was a single person. The only thing I knew about the band was that someone in it played flute. I always envisioned Mr. Tull with a little piccolo. In my mind, Mr. Tull looked like the Lucky Charms guy, only taller.
Flash, never trust a French word. Ever. “Croissandwich” has been fooling the masses for years.
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Comment posted at 11:52 on Sunday, July 20, 2003
selenium, don’t know joss raines, but i did go to the london office a couple of times.
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selenium
Comment posted at 15:50 on Sunday, July 20, 2003
Oh well, just thought I’d ask. He was in charge of grad recruiting for a while (from what he said the company was full of people who’d give einstein a run for his money). he, however, is crazy and falls over a lot. made a great best man though.
For a lonf time my brother thought that the Italian car-maker Fiat was actually “Flat”. (you have to see their logo to understand this one)
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selenium
Comment posted at 15:51 on Sunday, July 20, 2003
Oh well, just thought I’d ask. He was in charge of grad recruiting for a while (from what he said the company was full of people who’d give einstein a run for his money). he, however, is crazy and falls over a lot. made a great best man though.
For a long time my brother thought that the Italian car-maker Fiat was actually “Flat”. (you have to see their logo to understand this one)
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selenium
Comment posted at 15:51 on Sunday, July 20, 2003
oops
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heisenberg
Comment posted at 16:18 on Monday, July 21, 2003
For the longest time I could not figure out why Creedance Clearwater Revival sang, there’s the bathroom on the right. Giving somebody directions at a concert hall? Paradigm was one word I had seen and heard, but never put the two together for a long time. Early on, I thought Taj Mahal was a group.
Jethro Tull was a person. History of Horticulture - Tull, Jethro 1674-1741
(see http://www.hcs.ohio-state.edu/hort/history/107.html). I thought Derek and the Dominoes was a dumb rock group name until I heard the story - like Traveling Wilbarries (or however it’s spelled).
Jethro Tull was named when reference back to obscurity was the band-naming thing. About then, Grateful Dead was taken from some tome, possibly Ship of Fools. There was a Bosch painting and a Durer woodcut by that name, as well as a text, which I think Dover still is selling.
Help me, Grateful Dead came from a reference to the plague - the sick, the dying, and the grateful dead. What’s the context?? Was it Ship of Fools?
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heisenberg
Comment posted at 17:10 on Monday, July 21, 2003
Another —- Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, or some other regae guy, singing babble on, sister. Jamaican english is an excuse, plus the Rasta allusions, for mishearing regae. If you ever watch “The Harder They Come,” again, notice how at the beginning they use subtitles, and just about when you find yourself tracking the dialect, notice that the subtitles are gone. I never could catch when they dropped them, after seeing the film several times, and even trying to stay alert to when they did their transitioning. Too many Reefers of Babalon, I guess, before the film started.
As to the Dead, first time I heard the lyrics, I live in a silver mind and I call it Bakersfield, it made no sense to me, at all, but I figured it was one of those California in jokes.
Anyway, Resonance, thinking up the posting topic shows you are no dumb linguist, but a cunning one, as that lady in you class would probably think.
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Comment posted at 12:23 on Thursday, July 24, 2003
When I was a teenager, my friend’s parents were having a discussion about music and mentioned Vivaldi. I pipe up, “Oh, I love him. He did the Peanuts theme song.” They looked at me like I was the village idiot, because I was.
My mom thought that the warning lights on tall buildings and antenna towers were “stoplights for airplanes.”
And my wife thought, until fairly recently, that the words to Foreigner’s Hot Blooded were, “Come on baby, can you do modern dance?”
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Comment posted at 08:49 on Saturday, July 26, 2003
That reminds me a few things that I used to say:
Oni marks instead of on your marks.
Once apola time instead of once upon a time.
These were when I was young.
More recently:
Daring do instead of derring do
Fowl swoop instead of fell swoop
I guess it’s things you pick up by ear rather than through reading initially.
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heisenberg
Comment posted at 13:39 on Monday, July 28, 2003
I knew there was one recent “now I’ve got it” things I did not immediately recall. It kept bugging me until I remembered. Past my mid-50’s but within the last nine months, I learned I had always misunderstood the phrase, “Not playing with a full deck.” I had heard it, off-and-on, and mentally filed it as removing cards from a deck, playing unfairly, with the appearance of not doing so. I used the phrase that way, and was told that less than a full deck meant not being “all there” mentally. I was so taken aback I missed the chance to reply, “Oh, you mean, I should be saying something like, ‘under the radar screen’?”
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Van
Comment posted at 01:19 on Wednesday, March 03, 2004
I will never forget reading a note that a high school friend of mine wrote me that contained the phrase “might as well”, incorrectly written as “minus well”. Suffice to say, my friend wasn’t the most literate person on the planet. My brother was just recently berated by a group of friends when he referred to the musician as “Muddy Walters” in a music discussion. Finally, to quote Owen Wilson in Armaggeddon, “You know what I hate? When people think Jethro Tull was a person in a band” (regarding the confusion of such band names).
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tubi
Comment posted at 11:58 on Friday, March 26, 2004
Once my girlfriend in highschool wrote me a love later thanking me for giving her her very first ‘organism.’
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Brianne
Comment posted at 13:55 on Tuesday, April 27, 2004
I rarely hear people mention this one, but growing up I always heard “euthanasia” and “youth in asia” and thought it had to do with killing babies due to China’s “one-child” policy.
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Insecto
Comment posted at 00:24 on Friday, May 21, 2004
I once thought that etymology was pronounced like entomology. I knew what it was but could not get past the pronunciation. I can’t recall what I thought the study of insects was called. Perhaps I subconsciously thought they were homonyms.
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