Mishearing things (UK)

A while ago, one of Radio 4’s programmes talked about people mishearing song lyrics, with hilarious results.  Some of them even made more sense than the original.

This reminds me of two cases of people involved in messages misheard.

The first one happened at British Monomarks where I’d worked as a part-time telex operator throughout my first degree.  

(See also Thinking outside the box: 01, https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2020/12/thinking-outside-box-london.html) 

Subscribers would ring in and dictate their telexes to us.  One of them was a shoe company: they had contracted a factory in Taiwan to make the shoes, which they would sell in the UK.  On this particular occasion, the sender of the telex was placing an order for a batch of shoes, ending the message with a reminder to the factory to “make sure the shoes sit properly” (which was what my colleague heard down the phone line).  The people at the Taiwan end must’ve wondered about the way the British cultural perspective works: getting their shoes to “sit properly”, whatever that means.  Manager John Haste couldn’t get over it.  He went round saying and chuckling, for a number of days after that, “Make sure the shoes SIT!  Make sure the shoes SIT!”

The second story neatly confirms how easy it is indeed to get “s” and “f” wrong when heard down the phone line.

It had happened to an English chap doing Japanese during my first degree days at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London).

He’d originally got into Oxford to do zoology.  He’d done his end-of-first-year exams — that was the practice in those days: if you can’t even pass the first year exams, you’re deemed to be unable to get through the rest of the next few years of the course.  

The telegram from his mother arrived in Greece where he was having his summer holiday.  It said: SAILED ALL SUBJECTS.  He happily carried on with his holiday.  Got home and found out that it was meant to be: FAILED ALL SUBJECTS.

Note: English phrase for those who might not know: to sail through = to succeed easily

(UK, late 1970s)