History Main / NonverbalMiscommunication

* Partial example in ''Film/MenInBlack'' where the attractive female medical examiner attempts to signal to Agent J that there's a hostile alien in the room with them, and he thinks she's flirting with him, and while she is talking most of her indications of the alien are nonverbal.

* On ''Series/GoodOmens'', the nuns of the Chattering Order of St. Beryl are tasked with replacing the baby of the Downings family with the infant Antichrist, but the Youngs arrive before they can begin the procedure, throwing the nuns doing the switch into confusion. Eventually, it all falls to the ditzy Sister Mary, who switches the Antichrist with the baby of the Youngs. She and Sister Theresa give an exchange of winks, Theresa believing that Mary has kept perfect track of the babies, and Mary believing that Theresa was instead giving her praise for switching the babies. As such, nobody bothers to verify which baby is which, meaning that Aziraphale and Crowley spend the next twelve years monitoring over a perfectly human child and not the Antichrist.

* Music/WeirdAlYanovic's [[Music/MandatoryFun "Jackson Park Express"]] is built on this trope, as the entire song is about a man on the bus who continuously misinterprets the nonverbal gestures of a woman passenger. Somehow he turns her unconscious twitches into an epic unspoken tale of LoveAtFirstSight and their subsequent bittersweet breakup.