Fun with mispronunciations

Last night we were continuing our delve into 30 Rock: Season 1 when we watched the episode titled Rural Juror. Tina Fey says the title came out of a meeting where she confessed to having trouble pronouncing both of those words.

It got me thinking about reasons why some phrases are difficult to pronounce. For rural juror it's obviously the similarity of the sounds running together.

So here are some of my random thoughts on this subject:

Did the phrase Old Timer's disease come out of a confusion of understanding the phrase Alzheimer's Disease?

It's always been interesting to me that the word wolfies is an alternate name for the date rape drug's street name roofies. (And actually wolfies makes a lot more sense if you think about it.)

There are some words that become more difficult to say when you are drunk. I have heard that if you want to know if someone is drunk just ask them to pronounce the word specificity. Honestly though, that can be a bit difficult to say when sober.

This American Life did an episode on misunderstandings in childhood that don't get corrected and then have embarrassing results one day in adulthood. One story was about a woman who thought pedestrian xing was pronounced as pedestrian zing and was surprised when a co-worker said to her one day, "you know, xing isn't actually a word, right?"

Then there are the phrases that come from other languages that people like to throw around like Chacun a Son Gout.

But there was only one word that I thought might have been created from a blurring of two words together. The word cloot means cleft hoof and since I first heard it I wondered if somehow it was a bastardization of the two words because it was easier to say. OK, that's not a common word at all unless you are (I imagine) a Scottish sheep herder. There must be other phrases out there. Maybe I'm just thinking too hard.