Anyone who’s seen that Peter Kay standup where he talks about song lyrics that everyone mishears will know just how funny the wrong word in a sentence can be! One of my fondest memories was hearing a little girl singing along “All My Love All My Kitchen” at the top of her voice to Buddy Holly’s “All My Love All My Kisses”…! These kinds of mishears often make us giggle!
Did you know there’s even a term to describe them?! They’re known as “mondegreens”. This was after the author Sylvia Wright described mishearing something way back in 1954: her mother often read a poem to her out loud which she thought ended with “… and Lady Mondegreen,”. Some time later she discovered that the line was actually “and laid him on the green.”
Apparently, there’s a science behind it… whoever would’ve thought! It happens because hearing is in fact a two step process. Firstly your ears hear the sound that’s been made but then the next step is that your brain needs to make sense of what that sound means – the sense check. And if it’s noisy or the speaker’s mouth is covered (as we’re all experiencing at the moment with the wearing of face masks), there’s much more opportunity to mishear what’s being said.
I’m sure we’ve all been in that awkward situation where someone says something, we ask them to repeat it but then still don’t properly hear what was said…. so just end up nodding and smiling! According to a study commmissioned by Scrivens Opticians & Hearing Care, adults find themselves in exactly this situation about 4 times a month!
We’ve scoured the internet to come up with some of the best mishears (or even misreads) we can find, of which most we could find follow Peter Kay’s lyrics theme… we hope you enjoy them!
The power of spinach
We’ll begin with the one in our picture which shows a tweet by Gary Hopkins who noticed the incorrect subtitle from a sermon at Guildford Cathedral… “in the power of the spinach and the union of Christ!”
Is Taylor Swift a Starbucks fan?!
In her song ‘Blank Space the line ‘Got a long list of ex lovers’ is often mistaken for ‘All the lonely Starbucks lovers’
Nirvana’s shipping song…
Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is sung as ‘here we are now, in containers’.
A new Chinese new year?
It raised a few eyebrows on 31 January 2014 when on the BBC News talking about the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Horse, the subtitles on screen read “Welcome to the year of the whores. People around the globe celebrate”
Weather for fairies?
When BBC Breakfast’s weather presenter Carol Kirkwood’s informed viewers of gale warnings and the potential disruption to ferries, something was lost in translation. The subtitles read “There will be severe disruption to fairies”!
Sour grapes?
When Eamonn Holmes spoke to a contestant on a call into popular TV show “This Morning”, misheard her name and then called her a loser, viewers couldn’t help wonder if it was a case of sour grapes after finding out that the husband and wife team were being replaced on their Friday slot on the show…