Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for June 13, 2023

Dana might sing:

there was coffee in my clowns..

coffee in my clowns..

Back when Ellen Degeneres was a standup comedian, she had a routine about mis-heard song lyrics. “Oh, it’s ‘does he have it.’ Why was I thinking it was ‘monkey hatchet’? That doesn’t even make sense! I had a friend who was singing along to Billy Joel, ‘And I was kicked in the face!’ I decided not to correct him; he’d figure it out eventually.”

Maybe he was listening to a Weird Al Yankovic parody version

Sometimes the best lyrics are the ones you thought you heard.

Ear Bug!!!!!

Now I’ll have that earworm all day!

Peter Kay, misheard lyrics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7my5baoCVv8

I still haven’t figured out what that line means.

A friend of a friend thought this lyric was, “I can see clearly now, the rain is gone. I can see all lobster tails in my way.”

A friend thought the name of the Bee Gees song was, “Bald Headed Woman.”

I do enjoy mondegreens. And I bet you could fit ten or twenty clowns in the coffee.

My high school English teacher said when she was little she always sang in church, “There will be peas, peas in the valley, for me.”

Sometimes it’s hard to understand the lyrics. Creedence Clear Water used to mystify me before google. In Willie and The Poor Boys, I wondered, is it “new girls (or nickels) can’t be beat.” It’s “Bring a nickel, tap your feet.”But I found I wasn’t alone. I found a page dedicated to people who misheard most of the lyrics in that song.

http://www.amiright.com/misheard/song/downonthecorner.shtml

I knew someone who insisted that the lyrics from Betty Davis Eyes were “All the boys think she’s a spaz, she’s got, Betty Davis Eyes.”

Fun fact: Would you believe that Carly Simon wrote an opera? She did a collaboration with the Nashville Opera years ago and the recording is finally going on on streaming channels on June 23rd (Simon’s 80th birthday). More information at https://www.nashvilleopera.org/romulus

I thought it was “grounds in my coffee” but it’s “clouds in my coffee”.

Go figure…

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA mondegreen (/ˈmɒndɪˌɡriːn/) is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning.1 Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.23 The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, recalling a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray” (from Thomas Percy’s 1765 book Reliques of Ancient English Poetry), and mishearing the words “layd him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen”.4

“Mondegreen” was included in the 2000 edition of the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, and in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary added the word in 2008.56