(no subject)

[proximoception]

That's a lot of misremembering in one post.

Who was talking about reading "misled" as the past tense of "to misle" a while back? I did that too, and know others who have. Another common one seems to be thinking the three kings in the Christmas carol share rulership of a place called Orientar. You wondered if decisions had to be unanimous or just two out of three.

Comments

Mondegreens

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen

Re: Mondegreens

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

That's awesome. The perfect name!

My wife grew up thinking Prince's "Raspberry Beret" was "Raspberries - hooray!"

Two friends and I spent a large percentage of a cross-country road trip arguing about a song by I think The Verve called "Flashbacks" - part of the chorus runs "For the life of me I cannot remember why we never died for these sins" but one of my friends thought it was "why we never had forty cents." We later found out the song is about abortion, but he held on for a while even then.

My wife and I enjoy trying to reinterpret the incomprehensible lyrics to Creedence's "Sweet Hitchhiker" - which I don't think even Fogarty understands, because he's singing something much closer to 'Swedish.'

Re: Mondegreens

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

There are so many! I love how, even when you learn the "correct" versions, these songs are somehow overlaid with the "incorrect" versions you first heard. In the New Pornographers song "Bleeding Heart Show, " I can never tell whether Neko Case is singing "We have arrived too late to pay" or "We have arrived to late to play." I switch back & forth between them whenever I heart it--an aural version of Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit. I tease myself by refusing to look up the right words. Exercising my negatively capable faculty or something.

Re: Mondegreens

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

"hear" not "heart." Though I do heart it.

Re: Mondegreens

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

My brain doesn't work this way at all -- once it's informed of the correct version, the false one gets assigned to the same category as dreams ("nonsense data, flush on next reload"). Which is annoying, because it doesn't work this way for most false things that I unlearn, and I'd rather retain the entertaining ones.

Re: Mondegreens

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

Fascinating!

Re: Mondegreens

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Ah! Yes! I remember one! In Eleanor Rigby, I originally heard Father Mackenzie as Bottom Mackenzie. I assumed that his social ostracism was due to his offensive odour or something, hence the nickname. But I only remember that one because I wrote a comic about it.

Re: Mondegreens

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

Gorgeous. Perhaps you will post this comic sometime?

Re: Mondegreens

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

I was perhaps seven years old. Even if they're preserved somewhere, it'll probably be at least another decade before I cease to find juvenilia horribly embarrassing.

Re: Mondegreens

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

You'll be ahead of me, then.

Re: Mondegreens

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

My favorite of which is this. Allen Grossman, who has a very bardic way of lecturing, as teaching a course on the aesthetes at the end of the nineteenth century. He got a fantastic paper on Yeats as a poet interested in the "fantasy echo." Easy A. He asked the student where he'd gotten this fantastic idea. The student (I can find out his name: this is a true story and I knew it) said: "It's your term. You were talking about Yeats as in some ways a typical fantasy echo poet."

Thus "fantasy echo" is a self-describing mondegreen. Such self-description seems characteristic, perhaps, of every fin-de-siècle.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Haha! Because of "Man and the Echo"? Only other 'typical' ones I can think of are Sidney and Herbert.

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

How wonderful!

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Further misremembers: it was The Verve Pipe and the song was Freshmen. My brain is swiss cheese.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

sheila punkarelli never took advice.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

It happens most when people affect a voice not theirs, in this case Vedder's. Fogarty was from California, not the bayou. But of course his incoherence is sublime.

Re: Mondegreens

[thelican.livejournal.com]

That's why I named my Denver Quarterly piece "Fin de siècle." There's a line in there about the "fantasy echo."

Re: Mondegreens

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

Not until this minute did I know how badly I have been pronouncing that French.