Lay them on the green.

[hannah]

Gang.

Folks.

My dudes.

Fellow participants of this given social network.

I'll get to it: I need Mondegreens. When I started the fic I'm currently working on, I decided it should take its chapter titles from misheard lyrics. I figured it'd add to the atmosphere and create a slanted commentary on the subject matter, and I'd finally get to do something I'd wanted to try out for a while in something approaching a reasonable context.

Today I realized I needed some help in the matter. That, and it'd be better asking around for specific examples than scrolling through compilations of the more common ones. I'm not looking for "hold me closer, Tony Danza" - I'm looking for "it's all part of the palimpsest." (Trouble, by Voxtrot, and yes, that's going in there.)

If anyone's got something, I'd love to hear it.

Comments

[oldtoadwoman]

That's the first one that occurred to me too.

I also remember reading an essay by someone who thought "daunserly" was a word when they were a kid (convinced it meant something like "really beautiful") and how they tried using it in a sentence and got called out: "What does that even meant?" "Daunserly! You know, like in the national anthem. 'Daunserly light'."

From personal experience, most of my misheard lyrics are just *mumble*mumble* where I just can't figure out what they're saying at all. Rake up like a douche you know da roner in the night? I stubbornly maintain that that is not a misheard lyric; it's a miss-sung lyric.

I do recall having an argument with my sister about "The heart of rock and roll is the beat" versus "The heart of rock and roll is still beating". (Huey Lewis, "The Heart of Rock & Roll") But that doesn't seem funny enough to make a good Mondegreen.

There was an old Whoopi Goldberg movie called Jumpin' Jack Flash and it was like a spy movie or something where she was told the song was the key to decoding something (and this is before you could just look lyrics up online) so she's listening to the cassette over and over. "'I was raised by two lesbians?' ... Mick, Mick, Mick, speak English!" (I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag, which arguably makes even less sense.)

[nightdog_barks]

Heh. See, I always heard it as "Wrapped up like a douche, you know the rumor in the night," and even after I knew it was supposed to be deuce, I still heard the rest of it the same way. I didn't know until I looked it up tonight that the actual lyric is "Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night," which just ... makes no sense to me at all.

I also discovered a week or so ago that I had misheard the names of the friends in Santana's "Evil Ways." All my life I had thought it was Tina and Joan (as in, "Tina, Joan, and who knows who ... "), but Google says it is Jean and Joan, which was oddly disappointing to me.

So ... yes, this is me rambling about song lyrics. *g*