Of human inventivity (mistakings)

All things can be both a curse and a gift. And the human ability to see Things That Are Not is certainly one of those things. Miscommunication can bring a lot of misfortune, but there's also a good side to it. I believe cultural diversity is resultant of misinterpretations, like the changes we see in languages and stories, and a lot can be learn from understanding the process in which a misinterpretation can become a dissidence so distinct from the original and more veracious versions.

We admire the knowledge present in mythologies, but they are created from misinterpretations of the world. The god of death in egypt mythology Anubis, for example, is a jackal or jackal-headed entity (and later completely human, according to the increasing anthropization in the evolution of mythologies), for the egyptians would see these animals eating the rotting corpses or seeing their footprints leading to graves, and thought it was the doings of a god hunting the dead to bring them to the underworld. Such misinterpretations are inherent to "lesser-educated" people who created all these mythologies that, despite their scientifical invalidation, can still teach us so much about life.

Misinterpretations and mistranslations are very present in our lifes for its humorous purposes, as this subject is really common, and there are a lot of names for it. There's the Broken Phone game, which simulates the corruption of a original message. There's Mondegreen, which is the misinterpretation of lyrics and poetry, gaining a new meaning along the way (such as the popular Misheard Lyrics videos we see on youtube). Soramimi is the meaning being different from the intended one, this one having an emphasis on the mistranslation of languages. For example, from Metallica's Enter Sandman lyrics 'Til the sandman he comes...' japanese can hear "Chiyoda Seimei ni ikou!", which means "Let's go to Chiyoda Life Insurance!" (from wikipedia).

However, there's much more to be unveiled from this concept, and I want to understand the anthropological, psychological and mainly artistical value of this subject. I even think about doing my master degree on this (and I'm yet to see if it'd be in the field of anthropology or translation, or something of the two). The main reason that keeps me both interested and afraid of it is the fact that there seems to be little to no study of the impacts of miscommunication, and the little I've found are all about the obvious negative side of it. Everybody knows one can't make an academical study without having sources to back them, and I hate how this seems to block the way for new and different studies.