This book explores the covert and overt creative potential of misunderstanding. Viewed from the authors' perspective, misunderstanding proves an elementary and unavoidable aspect of linguistic and cultural communication that can have a surprisingly beneficial impact on social relations and concomitantly stimulate the emergence of new cultural forms. As the authors of the book prove, cross-cultural contact is definitely a dynamic and asymmetric process rather than a static and symmetric transfer of values from one culture to another.