Having a strong Australian accent (apparently) and childlike French, my landing in Montreal has been peppered with frequent mishearings and misapplications of language. These divert the trajectory of the conversation, and send it off to somewhere else.
Is a mishearing a cuff? I think so. It is certainly a vector.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/oliver-sacks-mishearings.html
I was once in a bus sitting next to an Australian person. We had a 20-minute long conversation, but most of it evolved around my question of what he had just said, because I could barely understand his accent. So each time we got a little further in the conversation, we got trapped again in my not-understanding.
ReplyDeleteSo maybe this was less about mishearing, but more about just not-understanding-at-all.
The difference might be that mishearing sends you off to somewhere else, as you said, whereas not-understanding might make you feel rather stuck.
It did feel very cuffed.