not about my bathroom ceiling

[rm]

Still poking at my LJ Idol entry in my head. This one is a real PitA because I know a lot about the backstory of the two different ideas that are topic choices, and I want to be true to them and not focus on colloquial sloppiness.

But, I finally just figured it out, thinking about my favorite misheard song lyric ever.

It's from a Decemberists song called We Both Go Down Together.

The correct verse is:

I found you, a tattooed tramp
A dirty daughter from the labor camps
I laid you down in the grass of a clearing
You wept, but your soul was willing


What I heard for ages was:

I found you, a tattooed triumph
A dirty daughter from the labor camps
I laid you down in the grass of a clearing
You wept, but your soul was willing


I still think mine is about 800 times better and more interesting and really, really disturbing. And hey, kinda works as a fic prompt, but first I have to write about goats and then I have to write about a realization I had about current fandom weirdnesses AND THEN I have to finish a chapter proposal for something....

Goats.

Yeah.

Comments

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

Misheard and misunderstood lyrics are fascinating.

I like my super creepy interpretation of "Anna Begins" better than the truth myself.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

See, that how I'd do the music vid.
Way better storyline.

There's a bathroom on the right!

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

The best mistook lyric I know of, is a friend, who shall be otherwise nameless, who thought for a long time that what Leonard Cohen wrote was:
You see that nightmare moving through the station/
I told you, I told you,/I was one of those.

Improving on Mr. Cohen is not easy, but evidently it's possible.:)

[argentla.livejournal.com]

I had that kind of misheard-lyric regret about that overplayed Paramore song, "The Business of Misery," which is about the narrator having stolen/won the Boy of Her Dreams™ from his skanky former girlfriend, and how the Boy is now much better off.

The actual lyric is "I watched his wildest dreams come true," which is not especially interesting. The first time I heard the song, however, what I thought she sang was "I watched his modest dreams come true." I sat there thinking, "Wow, that's pretty deep for a cheesy pop song..."

I'm still sad that I was wrong. I like to think that ten years from now, when the members of the band look back at their past efforts, they will be, too.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oh, your misheard is _FANTASTIC_.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Your brain is the subtler brain. :)

[argentla.livejournal.com]

Or at least the more cynical.

[neifile7.livejournal.com]

There is actually a word for these kinds of mishearings. It's "mondegreen." As far as I know, it was coined by Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle (although Google might tell you differently). He wrote a series of columns about them some ten years ago that I still recall as about the funniest things I ever read in a daily paper.

Oh, and speaking of mondegreens as fic prompts: the all-time classic is "Purple Haze," as sung by the incomparable Jimi: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" becoming, of course, "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy."

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, it was in my English text when I was in Junior High in the early seventies.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Here it is:http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mondegreen.
Dates from at least the '50s.

[neifile7.livejournal.com]

Glad to be corrected!

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Your servant.

[capulet-rose.livejournal.com]

Colin Meloy does sometimes slip into an accent that makes him sound like the Vlasic pickle stork. I can see how "tramp" could easily turn into "triumph." He adds a bit of a lilt to the word that turns it into two syllables instead of one.

[rothko.livejournal.com]

actually he kinda stretches it almost into three -- tuh-RAY-ump...

[capulet-rose.livejournal.com]

*listens*

You are correct Madam. :)

As a treat, may I point you in this direction.

[tartanshell.livejournal.com]

I like yours a lot better, too.

I'm guilty of hearing a really common mondegreen, from Alanis Morissette's You Oughta Know. Instead of "It's not fair to deny me/ Of the cross I bear that you gave to me," I heard, "It's not fair to deny me/ Of the cross-eyed bear that you gave to me." Which makes very little sense, but it's a great mental image. *g*

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

I had this whole complex interpretation of the XTC song 'Senses Working Overtime' that had to do with a misunderstanding of Britishisms:

And all the world is football shaped
It's just for me to kick in space

And all the world is biscuit shaped
[something something to feed my face?]

I thought the song meant an American football, and a 'biscuit' turned into more like a scone in my mind, so to me it was a metaphor about the world not being how we expect it to be (our senses tricking us, especially since they're 'working overtime' and all?).

Except, of course, soccer balls and cookies really are round like the world, and the song is much more straight-forward than I'd been thinking (for a good 5-10 years or so too).

A friend was so charmed by this that she wrote a song called 'Triangular-Shaped World' based on this story, with lyrics about how she loves me even though I see the world differently than she does :)

[shield-toad111.livejournal.com]

Goats?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Goats.

The idea of a scapegoat once involved actual goats. Actually, two goats. And since even the non-scape-goated goat winds up dead, the whole thing is sort of a raw deal. If you're a goat.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

See, no one knows that, because no one's read the Bible as a book, something I would strongly encourage.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Encourage people to read, not not read.

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

Oh, the Decemberists: how I love them. Who else has a song from the point of view first person dead baby?

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't know them at all, if it wasn't for rm.
Owe her big time.