a nice folk etymology or two

[Laurence Horn]

 From a review of the movie "Nurse Betty" on www.movietome.com,
describing the protagonist played by Renee Zellweger. (Emphasis
added.)

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Betty returns home in time to feed her non-deserving husband, who
does not even acknowledge her birthday. She is supposed to go out
with her girlfriend for a birthday celebration, and *unbenounced* to
Del, she has taken the Buick LeSabre that he had firmly denied her
from the lot to go out in style.
=======

I would speculate that the first step here would be to have been
exposed to a pronunciation of _unbeknownst_ not listed in the
dictionaries I've checked but that I suspect exists fairly widely,
one with the stressed vowel pronounced with the /au/ diphthong (as in
"now") rather than long /o:/ (as in "know").  This would render the
adjective homonymous with (and thus derivable from) one built from
the root of "announced", "denounced", "renounced", etc., as opposed
to its actual relation to the archaic "unbeknown".

The same review goes on to note of the protagonist that
============
In her diluted state, she finds herself in the middle of a real life
shoot out in front of the hospital.
============
I do like "diluted state" too, and it may even be more original as a
reanalysis (for obvious reasons, it's harder to check).  There are,
in fact, 475 google hits for _unbenounced_!

Larry