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Music Science

Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: The Science of Misheard Song Lyrics 244

Posted by samzenpus from the dirty-dean-and-the-dunder-cheese dept.
HughPickens.com writes Maria Konnikova writes in The New Yorker that mondegreens are funny but they also give us insight into the underlying nature of linguistic processing, how our minds make meaning out of sound, and how in fractions of seconds, we translate a boundless blur of sound into sense. 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. Another common cause of mondegreens is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that Steven Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O'Neill won a Pullet Surprise. The string of phonetic sounds can be plausibly broken up in multiple ways—and if you're not familiar with the requisite proper noun, you may find yourself making an error.

Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. "There's a bathroom on the right" standing in for "there's a bad moon on the rise" is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives.

Finally along with knowledge, we're governed by familiarity: we are more likely to select a word or phrase that we're familiar with, a phenomenon known as Zipf's law. One of the reasons that "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" substituted for Jimi Hendrix's "Excuse me while I kiss the sky" remains one of the most widely reported mondegreens of all time can be explained in part by frequency. It's much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.
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Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: The Science of Misheard Song Lyrics More

Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: The Science of Misheard Song Lyrics

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  • Steely Dan (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 11, 2014 @09:24AM (#48571699)

    Are you reeling in the yeast
    Stowing away the thyme
    Are you gathering up the cheese
    Have you had enough of mine

  • We Found Dove In A Soapless Place

  • For years, my ex had been singing:

    She never drinks the water, makes you order "fresh and pay"...

    until I pointed out that it was probably French Champagne.

  • In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida Bay-bee (Score:5, Interesting)

    by oDDmON oUT ( 231200 ) on Thursday December 11, 2014 @09:31AM (#48571741)

    In the garden of Eden, baby.

    Grandaddy of them all i'int?

  • Michael Winslow [youtube.com] of Police Academy fame

  • My personal favorite is from "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival: "There's a bathroom on the right" instead of "There's a bad moon on the rise."

  • Oronyms are part of Tamil grammar. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Thursday December 11, 2014 @09:53AM (#48571841) Journal
    I did not know it is called oronyms till I read about it today. But the pronunciation of a string of words differently to mean different things is part of grammar lessons in Tamil. The famous example I studied on eighth grade has the word "aarudhal" repeating throughout the poem, taking the meaning "six heads", "river on the head", "exchanged head" and "salvation" at different places.

    Most Indian languages are written exactly as they are spoken, no silent letters. They also have very strict rules about how the pronunciation changes when say, a "n" follows a "ga" or "cha" or "ta" or "tha" or "pa". In fact Hindi would reduce "N" to a dot, because the preceding consonant would unambiguously define the pronunciation of the n, even though n has three different glyphs representing the labial, palatal and the dental versions of it.

    Steven Pinker mentions some African languages using seven tenses instead of the usual present, past and future. Jared Diamond mentions some Pacific Island language that has words for "towards the sea" and "away from the sea", as in "there is a speck of dirt on your seawards cheek"

    The richness of the languages and constructs are astounding. And most of the 6000 languages of the world are moribund and are expected to go extinct soon.

    • The actual Zipf's law... (Score:5, Informative)

      by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Thursday December 11, 2014 @10:08AM (#48571949)

      Speaking of the richness of languages, TFA oversimplifies some important language tendencies too.

      For example, Zipf's law [wikipedia.org] (which is also linked in TFS) has little to do with "familiarity" or being "more likely to select a word or phrase that we're familiar with."

      It basically is just an observation that the statistical ranking of word in most natural languages is inversely proportional to its frequency. From the Wiki article:

      Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.

      Yes, I suppose one might get out of this that "we tend to choose words we're more familiar with," but Zipf's law is a MUCH more specific constraint on distribution of word frequencies. And it's more a statement about what word frequency distributions ARE rather than how we come to choose words or what we may be "familiar with," unless by "familiar with" you just mean "occurs more frequently."

      Moreover, there is some research that has shown a distribution somewhat like Zipf's law will emerge even in texts generated with artificial random "languages" composed of random letters... which makes the claims about how we're making conscious or sub-conscious choices about "familiarity" even less likely.

      • (Just to be clear, I'm sure that we DO make word choices on the basis of words we're more familiar with. But that really has little to do with the specific distribution concept called Zipf's law.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        In Japan these songs are known as "soramimi" or "mishearing" songs. They are usually in a foreign language, and the most famous one is Dragostea Din Tei by O-Zone, which I think are from Moldova. Anyway, the mis-heard words are influenced by the English vocabulary taught at school.

        Interestingly this applies to onomatopoeia too. The song goes "sent that beep" (send a text message to someone, make their phone beep). Beep is misheard as "beef" because that sound is thought of as "pi pi" in Japanese, rather tha

    • Benny lava!
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Re:Oronyms are part of Tamil grammar. (Score:5, Informative)

      by I'm New Around Here ( 1154723 ) on Thursday December 11, 2014 @11:52AM (#48572763)

      Jared Diamond mentions some Pacific Island language that has words for "towards the sea" and "away from the sea", as in "there is a speck of dirt on your seawards cheek"

      Hawaii has that.

      mauka - towards the mountain
      makai - towards the sea

      The mauka side of a house is whichever one faces the mountain. If you live on the north side of the island, mauka is southward, and on the south side mauka is northward.

      Also, if you are in Honolulu, and you are heading "eva", you are going west. If you are somewhere west of the town of Eva Beach [google.com], you might use that phrase, but I'm not sure whether it would mean you are going west or east.

  • A classic bluegrass tune "I Wonder Where You Are Tonight" by Jim & Jesse [youtu.be].

    Often heard as "I'll Wear Your Underwear Tonight".

  • The fire engine guy.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • A few weeks ago an older relative asked me "What's all this We're up for Mexican Lucky about?" I was admittedly boggled.
    Turns out he thought We're up all night to get lucky sounded like a nice riff about gambling across the border.

  • When I was a kid, I thought there must be some special lure to get you to go to one of Disney's attraction. I'm talking about Janet Jackson's Epcot Bait [wikipedia.org].

  • The Steve Miller band stumped me for years with "big old jet airliner," though I had no idea what he was saying. My best guess was Jeb O'Brian, whoever that was.

    In my 20s I spent a LOT of time listening to and writing down lyrics for my cover band and finally figured that one out (and no, I didn't have the album, in fact, I rarely had the albums, thank you very much - not really my favorite music, but I played it).

  • And in some cases it's purely a matter of poor enunciation and the singer not really caring that the sounds coming out of their mouth sound nothing like the words are supposed to.

    • While that's somewhat true, the mere act of singing properly (extending vowels and turning dipthongs/consonants at the beginning of the "next" word) leads to this quite a bit. I once learned a song mostly from a commercial recording, then found out that the (somewhat odd) words I'd learned in one phrase were different than what I'd learned. Thing was - it didn't matter. The vowel and consonant sounds were identical for all practical purposes, and it didn't matter which "words" were there.

      • People are terrible at enunciation in their normal speech and that's the reason why enunciation is terrible in songs. It has nothing to do with singing properly.

        The most flagrant offender of enunciation is "chewing" where you have a hard T followed by the word "you". The common result is a chew such as "I want you" becoming "I wan chew". It's sloppy and lazy.

        I say this as someone who has had the pleasure of performing solos in front of a live audience where you don't get the luxury of redos for that CD reco

  • When I was a kid, I thought "Silent Night" telling me to "sleep in heavenly peas".

    Then there was the hymn "Gladly the Cross I'd Bear", which I thought was about Gladly, the cross-eyed bear.

    • My favorite is Rocking Around the Christmas Tree

      "Later we'll have some fuckin' pie and do some caroling"

  • Shania Twain - That Don't Impress Me Much

  • As a kid I always wondered what the hell submersibles had to do with free will.

  • There is at least one released version of "Purple Haze" where he sings something very similar but instead of proclaiming to "kiss _this_guy" he sings "S'cuse me while I kiss _that_ guy."

    It's the "Live at the Sandiego Sports Arena" version on the Jimi Hendrix Experience box set.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      There's a sort of reverse Mondegreen at the end of Queen's "One Vision" where they sneak in some funny words that most people pass off as more normal words. After repeating the title phrase frequently in the song, at the very end they sneak in a "fried chicken!" It's easy to miss, and was put in as a joke. I cracked up a bunch of college friends by pointing it out to them. They had to listen to it half a dozen times to believe it was really in there.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        Then there's Paul McCartney and Wings counting on the Mondegreen for Helen Wheels.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 11, 2014 @10:58AM (#48572311)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Wrapped up like a douche, another boner in the night.

  • I give you, "Ken Lee":
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • My Nephew And I (Score:3)

    by lordDallan ( 685707 ) on Thursday December 11, 2014 @11:13AM (#48572451)
    Last summer I saw my nephew for the first time in a couple of years (he was about twelve years old) and found it eerie when he sang "Judy In Disguise" as "Judy In The Skies".

    I'd made the same misinterpretation at his age; watching him sing those same wrong lyrics was like a time warp. First time I felt that weird "oh we've got some of the same 'DNA stuff' floating around in us" feeling. Wouldn't surprise me if it's because our brains are wired up quite similarly in some key places.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      Conversely as a kid I ended up singing "Robots in the skies" instead of "Robots in disguise" to the Transformers theme song. To be fair, many of them could fly.

      Later in the same song where it says autobots "wage their battle" I was convinced it was "pledge their phantoms" which I guessed was some kind of swear on their souls sort of thing. Apparently I'm especially prone to these things, or was as a kid.

  • Ah fucken...

  • One of my favorites is "Hands to Heaven" by Breathe -- which is mostly a mawkish 1980s power ballad, until the chorus swells and...

    "Tonight I may just tweak your ass..." [youtube.com]

    Whoa! Getting a little raunchy there aren't we?

  • So far there's only one reference to kissthisguy.com [kissthisguy.com] and it's about a particular mondegreen in a particular song. I think the summary does us all a disservice by not tying this site into the discussion. It's a site all about the topic.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      It's a fun site, though some of the entries are so far off I lean toward assuming they're jokes/spam rather than real. (Then again, someone above claimed they heard "pet shark" for "best shot" so maybe anything really is possible.) Good way to spend some time, though.

  • It's bound to take your life.
    There's a bathroom on the right.

  • Chief Horses (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    NASA used to employ stenographers to record meetings, who would then transcribe their notes. I remember reading some transcripts that repeatedly mentioned "chief horses", and it took me a few moments to realize it was "G-forces" being mentioned.

  • At the time I first heard "Rock the Casbah" I didn't know the word "sharif" so there was no chance at all that I would not mishear that lyric.

  • How can I have sex without you (which actually kind of makes sense...)

    Another (more well known mishearing):

    Blinded by the light, Revved up like a deuce

    I hear something like "...wrapped up like a douche". I just can't take that song seriously... it's the douche song.

  • The host of the long-running Milwaukee Public TV show Outdoor Wisconsin is named Dan Small. On most shows, it sounds like he introduces himself with the line "Hi! I'm Damn Small." Once you've heard it that way, it's really hard to hear the "Dan" instead of "Damn".
  • Time to eat a fly...
  • I remember hearing The spoof version, "there's a bathroom on the right", during one of those Christmas marathon broadcasts, many years ago in LA and it sounded like John Fogerty was singing it himself. On the Hendrix song, if you have a smidgen of brain left to think that he was high on some sort of dope non-stop, kissing the sky is not so impossible to hear from his words. Also a guy of his reputation singing lyrics with gay undertones is unthinkable in my never so humble opinion.

  • Everybody in my family was a precocious reader -- me, my wife, my kids were all reading on an adult level while we were still quite young. So consequently we *all* have words we mispronounce because we learned them from reading before we heard anyone use them. It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized my word "sub-tull" and the word "suttle" I sometimes heard were one and the same -- "subtle".

    The family will be sitting around and someone will use an unfamiliar word, then there will be a brief

  • It's much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.

    In THIS day and age yes. In the day and age he made the song hell no. Never even dawned on me to think he says guy. But there are plenty of songs with hard to hear clearly words.
  • OM f'ing G... I remember being like 8 years old driving from LA to Victorville and hearing that song and asking my mom why they'd sing about a "bathroom on the right". She just laughed and told me it was "bad moon on the rise" and kept laughing and laughing and laughin. All these years I thought I was the only one. Thank god for this article. Now I know I'm not alone or weird. I don't have to kill myself now as all my reasons for being depressed stemmed from this one incident and now that I know others heard it too I feel so much better. Guess I can take the suicide hotline off my favorites list now...

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