Reply #8: How about a Freudian *mishearing* story?

[BurtWorm]

I don't think Freud ever specifically addressed how people mishear things in a very revealing way, just as they revealingly mispeak. You rarely ever find instances of it in other people unless they respond as though what they misheard is accurate, and we probably don't notice it in ourselves unless we find out for sure somehow how wrong our hearing was.

This is something that happened to a friend of mine that never fails to crack me up when I think about it. He was at social work school working on his doctorate. It's usually a solitary existence, but through various functions, he got to know some of the personalities in his program. One was a radical Queer activist--not a close friend, but someone whose activism made him well known among his colleagues.

One afternoon, my friend went to a cafeteria on campus where this activist and some others in the program happened to be eating, so my friend, not wanting to be antisocial, joined them. They were in the middle of some animated discussion which my friend, who is a little hard of hearing in one ear, didn't quite catch. At one point, my friend thought he heard the activist ask something like, "Who knows a straight white male?" So my friend piped up, "I'm a straight white male!"

My friend's colleagues must have given him some prize-winning :wtf: looks. What the Queer activist had actually said was something like, "Who likes white bread and mayo?"