From: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!dan Newsgroups: net.nlang Title: another school anecdote Article-I.D.: pur-ee.469 Posted: Thu Jul 29 11:16:08 1982 Received: Fri Jul 30 04:50:17 1982 The anecdote from "Re: another anecdote, by escs!jpj" reminds of one that a freind of mine told me. Apparently this electrical engineering student had a class that sported a Indian (near East) teachers assistant. One word in particular eluded the understanding of the entire class for almost the whole semester. The word was pronounced "boog-a-round", or something like "bugs around". Finally, my friend found out that the word was actually 'background'. It is amazing that one can pronounce a word so closely to what it should be, but still be misunderstood. Dan Ulrich pur-ee!dan