Emily Litella suffered from a dyslexia of the ear. It was Gilda Radner’s genius to build entire segments of the old “Saturday Night Live” (the only one, frankly, worth watching in reruns) on Litella’s mishearings of “sex and violins” or the “deaf penalty.” When corrected, she simply dismissed the previous conversation with “Oh. That’s very different. Never mind.”
Surely there have been classic mishearings and misreadings in Agincourt; misunderstandings that caused more than ripples in the course of community history.