There’s a really awful old British Music Hall joke that goes:
I say, I say, I say, “If I’ve got fruit and jelly in one ear
and cake and cream in the other. What am I ?”
“I don’t know, What are you?”
“A trifle deaf!”
I know, that’s terrible, but I did warn you.
With
or without dessert filled ears, mishearing can lead to some wonderfully
ridiculous confusions. I once had a conversation with a Brazilian friend who
spoke good English but who’s accent was strong (or maybe it was mine?).
I’m not sure how it came up but I was talking about hippies
and saying, “The whole thing started in San Francisco.” She said she didn’t
realize that, and had been under the impression it had begun in the Amazon
Basin. This surprised me and for what must have been a whole two minutes we put
forward our respective takes on the matter, but our conversation seemed to be
spiraling into bizarre nonsense. Finally, we stopped, backtracked, and
concluded that while I had been talking about the flower people she had been
discussing the origins of herpes.
That conversation righted itself pretty quickly, but It’s amazing
how long we can hold on to the misheard.
Almost everyone has a line from a song they've wildly
misinterpreted.
Amongst the many I've had inadvertently distorted are:
Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer, “...a pocket full of Mongols”. And
even though I now know it should be ‘mumbles’, I still imagine a hip-full of
miniature marauding horsemen.
The Four Tops song, “Burn the Dead” (Bernadette).
And then there was the astrological dawning of The New Age with, “A
Hairy Ass”.
Billy Connolly the great Scottish comedian, describes how, as a boy
he thought the hymn, “Gladly the Cross I’d Bare” was all about a cross-eyed
bear called Gladly.
But my all time favorite came from my son Paul when he was about
nine. A guy on the radio had been talking about misheard lyrics and Paul piped
up. “Yeah, there was a Beachboys’ song that confused me for ages. It was the
one that goes, “She’ll have fun, fun, fun till her Daddy takes her teabag
away”. (For the un-initiated that’s T-Bird).
And to conclude, because I am Canadian.
I give you, The Canadian National Anthem—
“Oh Canada, we stand on cars and freeze...”
Merry Christmas
Nick
6 comments:
Along those lines I explain in this old blogpost the History of John Oates as a member of the rock duo Hall and Oates, which my daughter had always thought was Holland Oats.
http://frostgiantpostcardstudios.blogspot.com/2011/10/john-oates.html
Then there is the wonderful musician, Crista Berg. And Madonna's lyrics, "Last night I dreamed of some bagel" (San Pedro) :)
My ex and I walked by a rather tipsy guy lying on a couch at a free-flowing champagne wedding reception, and he was singing "Once on a meadow, swahili, once on a meadow" to the tune of Guantanamera by the Sandpipers I think. We shared that throughout our entire short marriage.
As a youngster, I misheard the Lord's prayer as Our Father, who aren't in heaven, halibut be thy name. I also had problems with Hell Mary, full of grapes. It must have been a sign of oncoming skepticism.
LOL, love it Nick! So going to tell everyone we stand on cars and freeze!
For some reason 'Ghost riders in the Sky' always turns into 'Volkswagens in the Snow" :)
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