Thistle Kill You

Someone years ago dubbed these "eggcorns" (a mis-hearing of "acorn"). There's a website that catalogs them, including snippets of published text in which the mistake can be seen:

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

A friends of our's little daughter wanted to know why the weather down at the "windshield factory" was so important.

Some HS girls, back in the day, heard a new song, "Giggy Poo" which was the pet name for one of their boy friends. It turned out to be Navy Blue.

My brother is an X-ray tech and once showed me a pass around list (before the office email) of medical terms that are mispronounced by the general public, i.e. "spinal meningitis" comes out as "spinal moanin'jesus".

There's a clue in here about the user of these gems of elocution - Michael Curtiz was a director whose first language was not English. He directed "The Charge Of The Light Brigade" and at one point he called out for riderless horses to be introduced into the scene. Only his order came out as "Bring on the empty horses!" Co-star David Niven thought that was so funny that he used it as the title of his second book of memoirs.

Reminds me a bit of the Engrish thing. :lol:

There was a book published in the late 1800s called "English As She Is Spoke". It was intended to be a Portuguese/English phrase book but was written by someone who couldn't speak English and accomplished the feat by using a French/English dictionary to translate another Portuguese/English phrasebook. Some examples are on the Wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_As_She_Is_Spoke

I have a modern equivalent of "English As She Is Spoke", a French / English idiomatic translation book titled "Ciel! Mon Mari!" The title means "Oh My God! My Husband!" but literally translates as "Sky! My Husband!"

As with many idiomatic phrases in different cultures translating them word for word will leave you puzzled as their actual meaning:

Poser un lapin (Put down a rabbit) - Stand someone up, as for a date.
Un gros legume (A big vegetable) - A very important person (A bit of sarcasm is involved here.)

Actually the book has been helpful over the years although the author's intent was humor.

Anguish languish was a book printed in 1956 that is entirely written in homonyms.
When I was in school the library had a copy, cracked me up. 😊

An author going by the pen name Afferbeck Lauder (Alphabetical Order) wrote several books on how English and Australian should be pronounced.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_9?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=afferbeck+lauder&sprefix=afferbeck,aps,218