... two's stay, when is day, there is day, fried hay, sat herd haze, sung daze...
“Listen with your eyes as well as your ears.”
-Graham Speechley-
I’m on day nine of barely any sleep and let’s just say the mind slime is winning the battle here. As I slowly transform into a cave rat I thought it would be best to completely unfocus my thoughts and see what comes of it. Let my cognition dissonate.
Weird things happen to the unrested. The skins stretches in places peculiar. The mind follows and carves itself hollow and pumpkin scented until recesses you wish you were playing in, become pits that prefer wet salted crystal deodorants. What I am saying is it stinks.
I went to the eye doctor to get my vision checked about 10 years ago and they dilated my pupils without asking me. They said it was ok for me to go outside, so I did, but then the sun burned my pupils and I had to hide in darkness. I nosferatu’d into the local movieplex and the only thing showing was ENTOURAGE the movie. I remember little about it other than at some point a bunch of dude’s slow motion walk to the song EMINENCE FRONT by The WHO.
This song is good and you should listen to it, but also this is a classic type of song where for so many years I had no idea what the lyrics were. In replacement to lyrical truth, my mind decided to fill in the blanks…
The real lyrics are…
Behind an eminence front
An eminence front, it's a put on
It's just an eminence front
An eminence front, it's a put on
But to my ears it sounded like…
We are living in a butt
We are living in a butt
It’s a poodle
Years of thinking I was living in a poodle’s asshole were wiped away with one simple internet search today. Further I know WHO sings this song now, after mindlessly & confusingly hoping this was some one hit wonder pop band’s attempt to ape Pere Ubu.
When your mind lies and fills comprehension voids with alternative realities (#fakenews) you could be performing any of a number of linguistic feats, such as homophoning, mondegreening, or oronyming.
I’ll dig into that more in this article but first please let me divert for a second before I dive into these phenomena…
“When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.”
-Dalai Lama-
The song Eminence Front is also the intro music for the Dallas Mavericks, a decision made by a marketing executive named Matt Fitzgerald, who was trying to ape the magic of the Chicago Bull’s usage of the Alan Parson’s Project “Sirius”. I want to note here that the intro to “We Won’t Get Fooled Again” might have worked the exact same way, but I’m sure they held off that in support of keeping a frustrated fan base from echoing those titular lyrics when approached to re-up for season tickets.
I love a world in which competing marketing executives drive cars listening to classic rock and high fiving their minds while figuring out ways to enthrall people to cheer on really rich dudes playing with balls. So I had to look up and see how many songs are out there in the wild supporting sporting and which teams they associate with.
This article helped do some of the dirty work for me, and sparing you the listicle, let's just say that the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates rallying with Sister Sledge’s We Are Family is a highlight of all musical sports choices.
A few years back the St. Louis Blues rallied to a hockey title on the back of the great hockey anthem GLORIA.
Based on these two anecdotes I am seeing a pattern whereby your sportsball team can adopt a disco song and then win a title. I am now waiting for the Oakland, LA, Oakland, Las Vegas Raiders to start playing Italo disco before I am willing to buy a full season of tickets.
That said, the San Diego Chargers went ahead and made a full disco theme song and no titles have been found in its wake…
“The worst of all listeners is the man who does nothing but listens.”
-Charles Dickens-
When you listen to lyrics and hear the wrong words, are you doing an injustice to the experience and meaning behind the art, or are you simply embellishing and potentially improving the work? I am specifically directing this question at Weird Al, the historic philosopher and knower of all knowns when it comes to song enhancements.
The scientific term for mishearing is an incredibly cool word…MONDEGREEN…
In this great New Yorker article, author Maria Konnikova lays out some history on Mondegreen’s and their semi-related brethren such as the McGurk effect and Zipf’s Law. Imagine Justin Timberlake singing Crimean River and let the misinformation take you away…
Actually let’s do a more mellow version…
In her article Maria notes on the science…
“Hearing is a two-step process. First, there is the auditory perception itself: the physics of sound waves making their way through your ear and into the auditory cortex of your brain. And then there is the meaning-making: the part where your brain takes the noise and imbues it with significance…One of the reasons we often mishear song lyrics is that there’s a lot of noise to get through, and we usually can’t see the musicians’ faces. Other times, the misperceptions come from the nature of the speech itself, for example when someone speaks in an unfamiliar accent or when the usual structure of stresses and inflections changes, as it does in a poem or a song. What should be clear becomes ambiguous, and our brain must do its best to resolve the ambiguity.”
So based on my WHO experience I now know my brain’s response to ambiguity is to situate myself in a butthole of fluffed curly fur. I’m guessing this is why I struggle with theoretical physics but excel at the local dog park.
“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
-Ernest Hemingway-
Controversy brews on the grammar front however.
It turns out Mondegreen are actually Eggcorns or at least related. Eggcorns are alterations of phrases through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements, creating new phrases having a different meaning from the original but which still makes sense and is plausible when used in the same context.
The difference then between a Mondegreen and an Eggcorn is a mondegreen is a misinterpretation of a word or phrase, often within the lyrics of a specific song or other type of performance, and need not make sense within that context while an eggcorn must still retain something of the original meaning, as the speaker understands it, and may be a replacement for a poorly-understood phrase rather than a mishearing.
NPR put together a fancy list of audience recommended eggcorns here for us.
One of the most famous mondegreens is Bruce Springsteen’s and Manfred Mann’s blinded by the light…instead of getting revved up like a deuce most people think the old might manfred is revving up a doosh, which shockingly sounds like an extremely inappropriate and dangerous activity (noting I am always game to try though…my safe word is ouch you burnt my balls).
This most likely chill blog, named extra chill, has a really great history on this Springsteen mondegreen and if you have the time to learn things, please do dig in. Springsteen mondegreen is a rhyme, not an eggcorn by the way.
Now related to all these eggcorns and mondegreens are spoonerisms and oronyms. A spoonerism is an occurrence in speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched between two words in a phrase. Per Wiktionary, an oronym is a word or phrase that sounds the same as another word or phrase, such as "I scream" / "ice cream", "that's tough" / "that stuff", and "four candles" / "fork handles".
According to that article I just quoted mondegreens and eggcorns are actually just versions of oronyms alongside malapropisms. Malapropisms are the mistaken use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical, sometimes humorous utterance. I’m personally a fan of malapropping as a way to escape the drudgery of day to day have-to-doism. When I have to do chewers, I hang the lawn dry and watch the ditches.
Now malapropisms might also be known as dogberryisms because Shakespeare or Yogisms, because legendary Chicago Cub Yogi Berra, was quoted regarding switch hitters, "they hit from both sides of the plate. They’re amphibious." If the future doesn’t deliver mutant human frogmen baseball I quit.
Here is a list of malapropistic ononyms in case you need help naming your next funk record (I’m talking to you Con Funk Shun).
Any ways all this writing was just going a long way towards me waking up with the song Lady in Red by Chris De Burgh stuck in my brain sac. According to people typing things into the internet, Lady in Red is either the worst song of all time, and/or it might bring you to tears as it did to Diana Princess of Wales and Fergie, a woman who sings about lovely lady lumps.
The song is from the record Into The Light and was released as a single alongside the song "The Ecstasy of Flight (I Love the Night)". Inspired by de Burgh’s might, it is only right I attempt something not so bright and delight as I write tonight something quite slight (again this is just rhyming not eggcorning or dogberryiming).
I know none of that was oronyms, or homonyms or even Secret’s of Nimh. But I woke up this morning singing Lady in Red, an incredibly bland song, about a dude in a helmet style mullet dancing with a woman definable only by her fashion, and end this evening singing an incredibly bland malpropistic, oronystic, spoonerific mondegreen style eggcorn.
Actually it is just a pour lee written pair oh dee…
LADY IN RED part. II aka GRAVY ON BREAD
Gravy on bread, you taste good with cheese
I dip you in beer, and chew you with ease
It’s what I want to eat
Parsley and roe, some brewed tea on the side
I’ll never forget the way you taste on rice
Gravy on bread…
You learn something with no sleep, no sense, and no cognition. You learn that within ambiguity lies your true self. For me my true self is a man stuck inside of a dog’s rear obsessed with simple food combinations and soft rock. I encourage you dear reader to indulge in your unknown side. Accept mondegreen and oronym as an attempt at deeper purpose, and in the words of the great Frank Zappa, shiek yerbouti.
The listening quotes were great, especially the Alan Alda final. But I think maybe you need to take a creativity class or something so your posts aren't so linear and predictable. I think I may have actually been listening to your article because I feel changed/motivated to have a little more fun than usual today. (hopefully it won't be too brief a shift)
Solid playlist here. Well done! I was braced for you to talk about how listening to Eminence Front while sleep deprived adds more timing glitches, but only if you listen to it backward. I had the turntable ready. High praise for the “San Diego Super Chargers” - Berman loved that track. Agree with Rick too, the quotes on listening are tremendous.