Nuts

Mum: "I've been getting produce from the nuts and co-op."

What She Meant to Say: "I've been getting produce and nuts from the co-op."

Wrid

Mum: "By the wrid, I way the rest of you."

What She Meant To Say: I haven't the faintest.

Shoes

Mum: "To hell with fashion, I'm going to get the rest of my food! Shoes!"

Tim

Mum: "He had, in his opinion, had the tim.  Pinned."

What She Meant to Say: I have no damn idea, she was laughing too hard to explain.  I think the "he" in question was one of our cats.

Pregnant

Mum: "Well then, you're pregnant."

What She Actually Said: "Well then, I beg your pardon.

(Note: I'm a guy.)

Eyes

Me: "It's all right.  You're a mother - that means you've got eyes in your backside."

Sex

Best Friend: "We should have sex!"

What She Actually Said: "Are we all set?"

Water

Mum: "Could you please make more water?"

What She Meant To Say: "Would you please get me more water?"

Buttocks

Viking Friend: "I shall smite you with my buttocks!"

What He Actually Said: "I shall smite you with my battleaxe!"

Evil

Mum (looking at a photo of a cake decorated spectacularly as the Eye of Sauron): "Wow, that's fantastic - don't know if I'd feel comfortable eating it, though."

Me: "Yeah.  There's just something odd about cutting into a giant, flaming, sentient, evil eyebrow.  Eyeball! Eyeball!"

Frog

Mum (joyously): "I'm a frog!"

What She Actually Said: "I'm enthralled!"

Whales

Grandma (at the crack of dawn, while running, flailing, in her nightgown, into the Pacific Ocean,  yelling at a pair of blue whales): "No! No! No no no  no no!"

Context: She was worried they were about to beach themselves.

Haddock

Best Friend: "Right now, I am a haddock."

What Best Friend Meant to Say: "Right now, I have a headache."

Temperature

Mum: "It's supposed to be in the early 60's today."

Backwards

Context: We had just driven two hundred some-odd miles, thrice in one day, as part of a long and convoluted move from one city to another.

Mum: "And just think; tomorrow we get to do the whole thing all over again - BACKWARDS!"

Daisies

Mum (dishing up spaghetti for Grandpa): "Careful, guys, it's got bay leaves in it."

Grandpa: "It has daisies in it?"

Me (entering the kitchen from outside just in time to hear him): "It has BABIES in it!?"

Flood

Grandma (nearly every time she called this poor man's office): "May I please speak with," pause to think, and enunciating very clearly: "Fuck Chlud?"

(This happened so often that whenever she called him, her co-workers gathered round her desk to enjoy the inevitable auditory fireworks.)

Spiders

Best Friend (comfortingly, to arachnophobic friend she just startled badly with a rubber snake): "I'm sorry, I didn't realise - I mean, there are people who don't like spiders, who like other things!"

Birds

Me (waxing eloquent): "Come look out the window - it's beautiful out here, the sunlight's all mellow gold, and the trees in front of Bucky's house are in bloom, and full of hummingbirds - "

Mum (trying not to laugh): "That's not very poetic!"

Me: "How so?  They're gorgeous, they look like little embers!"

Mum: "Oh...Oh!  Hummingbirds!  I thought you said 'fucking-birds!"

Me: "Well, it is  spring..."

Sunset

Mum: "When we lived in Tualatin, I liked to look out to the east and watch the sunset."

Context: Trees, hills and buildings blocked the view westward, and Oregon's frequently dramatic skies beautifully reflected the sunset's colours.

Dishes

Mum (passing me a dish to wash): "This too shall pass."

Me (goggling at her): "This too, shelf-ass!?"

Biting

Me: "If it was my ass, it would've bit me."

What I Meant To Say: "I'd forget my ass if it wasn't attached" or "if it was a snake it would've bit me."

Glasses

Mum: (exhales as I lean over her shoulder to hug her at her office chair)

Me: "You fogged up my glasses!"

Mum (astonished): "I fucked up your glasses?"

Fuzzies

Me: "It left me full of warm-and-fuzzies."

Mum: "EW!"

Me: "...Yes Mum, there are no organs in me, just kittens. Raw and wrrrrrrriggling."

Mum: "Ewwww!"

Crow

Clark: "I had to suck some crow, though."

What He Meant to Say: "I had to suck up" or "I had to eat some crow."

Soup

Me: "Thank you for the cat soup!"

What I Meant To Say: "Thank you for the cat socks!"

Refrigerator

Me: "Grandpa was in the fridge this morning, looking for the milk..."

Mum: "Really?  Why didn't you tell me? It'd be a hoot to see the long skinny legs sticking out!"

Nutria

Context:  This one needs three background details in order to make the proper amount of nonsense. First: several years ago, I had just moved to Portland, OR, from the Southwest, after a personal rough patch that left me a wee bit sleep-deprived.  Second: during the nineteenth century fur boom, some enterprising soul imported a large rodent called the nutria to the Pacific Northwest, to raise for fur.  Third: at the point at which this occurs, I'd been in Portland approximately four months and, still not having seen one of the little buggers, had begun to insist my family had made them up to pull my leg and that "nutria" was, in fact, a kind of snack bar.

Me (in the passenger seat of Mum's moving car, having just spied a nutria): "There, there was a-! I saw one!" (cue frantic gesticulation)

Butter

Mum (across the dinner table from me, gesturing imploringly at the butter):  "Hoo, hoo!"

Shoved

Me (writing): "She stared her prisoner in the eye across the starkly lit steel table and, coldly and deliberately, shoved her glasses up her nose."

Microwave

Mum: "Your microwave's in the oven."

What She Meant to Say: "Your dinner's in the microwave."

Hands

Mum: "You're still getting inky fingerprints everywhere. Make sure you wash your hands well before you dry them!"

Me (once I've stopped laughing too hard to speak): "I'm hardly going to dry them before I've washed them."

Touching

Me:  "The cat kept being cute at me and touching me with my paw."

Mum: "With your paw, hm?"

Ringwraith

Mum (holding out a crumple of aluminium foil):  "It's a tulip!  It's just opening - here are the petals, and here's the stamen, and here are the leaves."

Me:  "Nope. Wrong.  It's a ringwraith.  Look, this is its robe, and this its hood, and here are its angry little arms, and - "

Mum (startled and disturbed): "Here's its WHAT!?"

Me (nonplussed): "Its angry little arms...?  With the spiky gauntlets and the stabbing?"

Mum: "Oh thank god, I thought you said angry little arse!"

Owl

Me (musingly, looking up at Mum from my computer): "Owl legs."

Mum: "Hello,  wait, what did you call me?!"

Context:  She was wearing a shirt with a snowy owl on it.  Apparently I found its legs somehow significant.

Watching

Mum: "When we get the TV room set up, we'll have the couch across from the TV, with the coffee table in front of it so we can sit there and eat movies and watch popcorn."

Coffee

Grandpa (reminiscently): "Back when I first met your grandmother, she used to pour a lot of coffee in her hair..."

What Grandpa Meant to Say: "Back when I first met your grandmother, she poured so much cream in her coffee that it turned the colour of her hair."

Migraine

Mum: "If the migraine's in the van, you need to take the keys and move it."

What Mum Meant to Say: "I have a migraine, so before the contractors show up you need to take the keys to the van and move it out of their way."