mondegreens

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  • Heh.. Well, back on the parenting thing...

    I went to the JoCo concert in St. Louis and wanted very much to buy a shirt.. But the two he had offered were the Skullcrusher Mountain and Re:Your Brains shirts. I went with Skullcrusher Mountain, because I couldn't begin to figure out how I'd explain to my 7-year-old why Mommy was wearing a blood-soaked memo on her shirt.

    I didn't realize just how much I was listening to my Coulton songs around the kids until my 2-year-old daughter padded past me singing, "I not kill you yet.."
  • Indigo: That is possibly the most awesome thing I've heard in a while. :-)
  • *laugh* Glad you liked it.

    I'm obviously playing a lot more 'My Beige Bear' now. ;)
  • Welcome Indigo, nice to have some more moms here.

    My husband got the RE: Your Brains shirt in September and was wearing it at Christmastime on a Polar Express train ride. He got at least three comments from the train staff about it, usually "Hey, nice shirt!". I'm still wondering if they knew it was splashed out brains or thought it was just festive red.
  • It's always good when your kid says that to you [IndigoMonkey].
  • I don't know, Jesss... It's pretty hard to mistake that red for anything but blood, unless someone thinks you threw paint on yourself. ;)

    But yeah, I'd much prefer my daughter not kill me yet. There are times, though, when I would like to know what else the voices in her head are saying to her. She's going through that phase when she wants to take off all of her clothing and run around naked. I gather this is normal and all, but I'd appreciate it if she'd maybe hold off on this particular phase until it's not ten below outside.
  • I've been browsing the forums and finding little corners that intrigue me, long after they've dropped off. And here I am again.

    @c4bl3fl4m3, I am so with you on the "Oh yeah?!" to the truism that people who curse are unintelligent or uneducated or inarticulate. A former boyfriend who was very creative with the swear words also used to translate Latin poetry in his spare time for fun. The combination of funny as hell and filthy-mouthed doomed me. I went from a dedicated non-swearer to an effin' crazy woman. (20 years in New York City also did not help.)

    On the topic of "gay" and "retarded" and such. It seems to me that once someone says it hurts them when you use certain types of language, it just feels like bad form to keep it up. I've gotten rid of "gyp" and I'm working on "retarded," which I've been hearing since childhood, so it's rather more ingrained. I've never picked up "so gay" and never intend to; in fact, I bought Kanye West's first cd without having heard it just because he asked hip hop fans and artists to stop using gay as an insult, because he has a cousin who's gay and he loves him. (It's a damn good cd, too.) It's worth knowing that use of some terms can cause someone to judge you and hang onto that judgment without you being aware of it. There's a woman I work with that I heard say "they'll Jew you" the second day I worked there, and I have put up something of a wall between us (though she gave me more reasons when I got to know her better).

    AND: on the topic of maundegreens, the first few -- well, many -- times I heard "Skullcrusher Mountain" it was on my computer's crappy speakers, and I thought it was "I'm so empty but I'm way too smart for you." And it was several listenings before I caught "yet" after "I shouldn't kill you."
  • edited February 2008
    I am quite a n00b, Hepcat, so that is my excuse for joining old threads. Yeah, I know, it's a "lame" one ;-)

    Back on mondegreens, I don't know if this qualifies, but I did find the phrase "bad-ass fucking fractal" quite funny, assuming the placement of a hyphen can be misheard. The pattern is not without precedent, as this testifies.
  • I'm pretty much a n00b, too, so greetings!

    Okay, the "ass-car" cartoon made me laugh. (Which sounds like NASCAR, which leads to a completely wrong but amusing line of thought.)
  • Newbie or not, this thread wasn't that long ago... ;)

    [I'm kidding! Of course I don't expect anyone to know every joke ever made in the forums. Maybe this one should go in the FAQ, though...]
  • Okay, okay, I consider myself chastised. Was way too obvious, and therefore insulting to everybody else to assume it hasn't yet been discussed to death ;-) I did have a thing for the ass-car cartoon long before discovering JoCo, if that counts as extenuating circumstances.
  • No, no, I just thought it was funny that two different people came up with it within two weeks of one another, both referencing xkcd.
  • BryBry
    edited February 2008
    from the Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance discussion thread:
    Where's that mondegreens topic again? I always thought "shoots his cuffs" was "shoots his cups", as in he tosses downs his booze, which made sense after hearing what he'd had for breakfast. "Shoots his cuffs" is actually a more evocative image though. I like it. -- Spiff
    You know, I thought the same thing, and I also like the intended lyric much better.
  • Damn, you might not believe it, but this is a true mondegreen. When rereading robgonzo's quote in this thread just now, I finally realised that "Tom Cruise Crazy" doesn't have quite the lyrics I thought it had. I have been hearing "...he sees a thousand young-girl-eating men." Which, given that "eading" is a completely acceptable US pronunciation of "eating", makes it a 100% phonetic match. The question is, did JoCo slyly put it there to trip me up?
  • I got mixed up the first time I heard Mandelbrot Set. I forgot Americans say Zee not Zed, so I heard it as Cee... The formula made no sense!
  • Borba, that is fantastic (especially, as you say, how well phonetically it matches up). I think I shall have to hear it your way from now on.
  • My mishearing isn't quite as interesting but I keep hearing "Lady Aberlin's Muumuu"'s line of

    "I wander somewhere in or out of make believe" as "I wander somewhere in a realm of make believe", nothing major but it gets irritating when you sing one thing and you know you've got it wrong.
  • You know what? I've been making the same mistake, Jon. Funny thing is, I heard "in a rout of make-believe", and since that didn't make sense I assumed I was mishearing "realm."
  • I should add that I truly enjoy mishearing things, since the mishearings are sometimes better than the originals. That can make me an irritating person to be with.
  • @Borba - Oh, me too. I've kind of gotten to the point where I'm never really sure if I actually misheard something or if I chose to mishear it.
  • my boyfriend recently made me a mix cd of the contemporary rock-and-roll music that the kids are so into these days so i'd have something to listen to at work, and there's a lot of radiohead on it. i am not extensively familiar with radiohead, so for a while i kept hearing "karma police" as "gallipoli" and wondering why they were writing a song about world war 1. don't even try to ask me how i managed that - i've always had a terrible ear for picking out lyrics in a song with which i am not familiar.
  • When I first listened to Skullcrusher Mountain, I thought the end of the chorus said "I shouldn't marry you" instead of "I shouldn't kill you yet." Somehow they both work in that evil genius sort of way...
  • edited March 2008
    @three08, I've had that problem with some of what my husband listens to. I wasn't a big fan of metal when I met him, so I'd never heard half of what he listened to (Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and so on) and I had some serious difficulties with a lot of it. The one he still makes fun of me for, though is by Accept. It's called London Leather Boys. I'd probably heard it 10 or 20 times before I screwed up the nerve to ask him what a Lug-Nut Leather Boy was. Of course, I've found wonderful ways to torture him - one song by Black Sabbath is called "Headless Cross". I said, "That's just a great big T!" and so that's how I sing it when he plays it. Talk about some dirty looks...

    And here it is, almost 17 years since I met him and I'm going to an Iron Maiden concert with him in a couple of months. I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to it or dreading it. He dragged me to see Styx (which wasn't bad), so I dragged him to see JoCo (which was AWESOME, and the husband is now a huge fan). He's dragging me almost 70 miles to see Iron Maiden (and I won't talk about the ticket price), so I'm making him go see Eddie Izzard (at least he likes Eddie Izzard - I might have to find something else to annoy him with).

    Oh, I'm so metal. (Although I do love Black Sabbath's War Pigs - some things never change...)
  • Damn! Where is Eddie Izzard performing? Is he doing one of his comedy stage performances? [Green with envy here....]
  • Ahh, I saw Eddie Izzard perform years ago, before he got big.

    The make-up and high heels were off putting to a lot of folks (including my friend who I took with me) but he is so, so funny.

    That reminds me, I've had the last 3 episodes of The Riches on my PVR for ages, but my wife and I have struggled to find time to watch them. Gotta get that sorted!
  • Eddie Izzard tour dates
    I have a friend who emailed me a code to purchase tickets early. Yay for friends!
  • Lord! He's going to be in DC!!!
  • Not really a mondegreen, more of a garden path sentence or something, but whenever I hear Famous Blue Raincoat, the line:

    And you treated my woman to a flake of your life

    trips me up. There's a pause after 'flake' so I always initially parse it as:

    And you treated my woman to a Flake
  • I'm going to see Eddie when he comes here June 5th! wheee!
  • My sister and I are trying to work out seeing Eddie in May now.
  • Hey, my friend last night was shopping with me and was singing "Big Bad World". She kept saying. "smile that doesn't come with cheese".

    I guess that would be the non cheesy grin!
  • While at the JoCoLoCoNoToeHoboFotoFoGo it was established that I have some lines in I Feel Fantastic wrong, else he has two different versions-one that he releases and one that he sings live, very cunning Mr C very cunning indeed.
  • Whoa!

    What are your (or his) alternate lines?
  • I hear the second verse as saying "I can see the day unfold in front...yatta yatta" and in concert last night at least he said "I can feel the day unfold in front of me"
  • Dude, I don't think he's ever sung "yatta yatta" in that song. :-) Although, I have heard him alternate between " I can feel the day" and "I can see the day."
  • I realised last night that I'd always misheard a line in Millionaire Girlfriend, I thought it was 'as my manservant bosses me' and could never quite understand it. Last night he clearly sang 'flosses' and it made so much more sense (as well as being a very amusing image.)
  • In D,SJ,D I thought "shoots his cuffs" was "shoots his cuss".
  • Millionaire Girlfriend: "As I watch garden or mow the lawn"
    The real line always seems a bit strange "As I watch gardener mow the lawn" - feel like there should be a "the" in there.
  • @Gina: It reminds me of the way Karen spoke on Will & Grace. Her servants didn't have names. Except for Rosario the maid, it was "gardener," "cook," "driver," etc., because to her, they weren't people.
  • Through the magic of occupational bynames, Gardener, Cook, and Driver can be names.
  • Through the magic of occupational bynames, Gardener, Cook, and Driver can be names.
    Yep, most surnames come from either an occupation or place.
  • And many place names come from surnames, and then those place names are given to more people as surnames, who then go discover new places and name them after themselves, or directly after other places... I often think it would be interesting to chart the origins of place names as far back as possible, e.g. place1 was named after John Place1 who got his name from Place2, the birthplace of his paternal grandfather, which was named after Place3, an important city in the home country of the guy who discovered Place2, which was named after the founder of Place3, who got his name from his paternal great-grandfather's profession. Or alternatively the name might be traced back to some feature of the original place that had the name, or there might be translations or transliterations along the way.
  • this is a question i wonder about, because i sometimes hear it either way - is it "shoots his cuffs" or "shoots his cups"?
  • Lyrics page says... cuffs. Which is how I always heard it.
  • But if you happen to have a strong Filipino accent, there is no difference between "cups" and "cuffs" ;-) And as an added bonus, you get to rhyme "goes" with "Gross".

    True story. A few weeks ago I spilled coffee on my laptop keyboard. Since it is a sealed unit, repair options were limited to extreme measures, in this case, soaking it in water overnight. After two rinses it works again, but after the first wash it exhibited the most fantastic dialect problem, in that the letter "F" didn't work at all, whereas depressing "P" would result in "PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF".
  • In case anyone else was as mystified as I was, this page says:
    SHOOTING YOUR CUFFS - "goes back to the days when celluloid collars and cuffs were the salesman's answer to the laundry problem when on the road. With the high-buttoned jackets of the period, the collar and cuffs were all that showed, and since celluloid could be wiped clean with a damp cloth, a drummer of the period could make a shirt last a week. One of the showy tricks of dandies of the day was to 'shoot their cuffs,' which a dictionary of the period defines as 'making a sudden and ostentatious display of one's cuffs.'." "Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins" by William and Mary Morris (HarperCollins, New York, 1977, 1988).
    Also, that's an excellent story, Borba. If only I'd known that was possible when I had the seemingly impossible task of getting orange juice out of an Apple (it wasn't a major spill, so I just put up with having sticky power and delete buttons.)
  • I came across the expression while reading Main Street. Here's the quote:
    The men shot their cuffs and the women stuck their combs more firmly into their back hair.
    So the usage goes at least as far back as 1920, when the book was written. The events at this point in the book were closer to 1912 or 1913.
  • There's a discussion about this lyric on the "Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance" thread, in which shooting cuffs was described as a 'male preening gesture.' I loved that phrase. Made me think of bowerbirds & peacocks.
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