Misheard Who lyric

Date: 15 Jun 2003 21:02:02 -0700
Newsgroups: alt.music.who
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Waxing lyrical is hysterical
June 16 2003
Mark Raboo speaks of the moment when he wished the floor had opened
and swallowed him, and all because of some misheard lyrics.
The 24-year-old was jamming with a rock band when a guitarist launched
into the opening chords of The Who classic I Can't Explain, and he
joined in on vocals.
"The real lyrics were 'A certain kind, can't explain'," says Raboo.
"But I misheard them as 'Been circumcised, can't explain.' The
laughter ended that cover pretty quickly..."
For Lisa - her last name understandably remains under wraps - public
death by ridicule occurred when she took the microphone at a karaoke
party to celebrate her 20th birthday.
Her nemesis, in front of 250 guests, was Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing.
The real lyrics ("Darling, you're so great/I can't wait for you to
operate") had always been understood by Lisa to be "Darling, you're so
great/I can't wait for you to ovulate".
"Hilarity ensued," Lisa recalls bleakly.
Mark and Lisa are casualties of something called a mondegreen: when
you mishear a lyric in a song and even if the words seem a bit daft or
total nonsense, they simply stay in your head and you always sing them
that way.
Until now, mondegreens were obscure. They were a closet of private
shame and humiliation that few wished to open up to the world.
But the arena of internet, with its mixture of openness and selective
privacy, has changed all that.
Mondegreens are now a tribal phenomenon, breeding numerous collectors'
sites on the internet where victims, including Mark and Lisa (see
below), register their self-mangled versions of pop lyrics and compare
them, sometimes with dismay, to what the true lyrics were.
There is even a popular book, "'Scuse Me, While I Kiss This Guy"
(named after a widely-misheard line in the Jimi Hendrix song Purple
Haze -- "'Scuse me, while I kiss the sky").
The book's compiler, Gavin Edwards, has a treasure chest of
mondegreens.
Remember the opening line to David Bowie's Space Oddity? Could it
really have been "Clown control to Mao Tse-tung"?
What about that raw song by punk group The Clash, Rock the Casbah,
misheard by some sad individual as Rock the Catbox? And The
Eurythmics' "Sweet dreams are made of cheese"? Or that memorable line
in the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," when "The girl with
colitis goes by"?
Then there is that Bob Dylan protest song with the refrain, "The ants
are our friends/They're blowin' in the wind," and the Cuban song
Guantanamera, which some mondegreen victim, presumably not a Spanish
speaker, construed as "One-ton tomato."
Spare a thought for the unfortunate who misheard a line from Irene
Cara's Flashdance ("Take your passion and make it happen") and spent
much of his life singing it as "Take your pants down and make it
happen."
Pop music is not the only source of mondegreens. Hymns and national
anthems are also a rich vein, and many of the victims are the innocent
young.
Jon Carroll, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist and mondegreen
collector, says the most frequent submission to his Centre for the
Humane Study of Mondegreens is "Gladly, my cross-eyed bear" - a
distortion of an old hymn, "Gladly My Cross I'd Bear".
He also recounts the wee lad down under who sang his national anthem
("Australians all, let us rejoice") as "Australians all love
ostriches".
Why are they called "mondegreens"?
The term was invented in 1954 by a writer, Sylvia Wright, who
described how she had misheard part of a Scottish ballad, The Bonny
Earl of Murray.
"They hae slay the Earl of Murray/And Lady Mondegreen," was how Wright
interpreted a stanza.
For years, Wright mused about the enigmatic Lady Mondegreen who had
died so tragically with her liege.
Only later, much later, did she discover that the villains had slain
the Earl of Murray -- and laid him on the green.
AFP
This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/16/1055615707371.html