Nerd--My word choice probably didn't convey what I was trying to say. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that if the word didn't quite seem clear to the listener, they took a stab at what the word was or the spelling was, and ended up changing it.

As an example, consider what happened last week at work. My boss called me in to listen to a voice mail message on his phone, because he couldn't quite make out the woman's name as she was pronouncing it. The last name sounded like "Harrell" and the first name sounded almost like "Thelma," but was a little breathy. She had left a phone number, so I typed it into google, and by getting her last name and the family phone listing (actually "Haral") I was able to figure out that her first name was actually "Alma." It took figuring out what she was doing with the letter "A" to get what the right name was.

SRS