Misheard lyrics and industrial deafness

One aspect of industrial deafness that will cause particular distress to a music lover is the fear that he or she might not be able to enjoy music any more. Fortunately, for all but those with the most acute forms of hearing loss, the use of a hearing aid together to with some adjustment in listening habits will mean that they should be able to still take some enjoyment from music.

One problem frequently reported among those with industrial deafness is a problem with hearing song lyrics, or, to be precise, mishearing lyrics.

Yet it seems that the problem of mishearing lyrics is not exclusive to people with some form of hearing loss. In fact, despite having completely unimpaired hearing myself, I frequently either fail to make out what the words of a song are, or mishear them and end up construing a completely distorted meaning.

I am by no means alone. There is even a word for the misapprehension created by the mishearing of sung or spoken word: otosis.

And, no matter our age, it would seem none of us are immune to the odd fit of lyrical otosis. Even my three-year-old has her moments. Recently, on the way home from a cafe, where Madonna's Like a Virgin had been playing in the background, she suddenly started singing, "Like a gherkin, touched for the very first time." She was clearly delighted with the effect, because it has been her refrain for about a week now. Who knows, perhaps it wasn't otosis but a mark in the evolution of her paronomastic invention. It certainly makes a change from endless substitution of the word "you" with the word "poo".

And it is purely a coincidental that one website poll rated another misapprehension of the same song top of its misheard lyrics chart. This version goes, "Like a Virgin, touched for the thirty-first time." As a frigid youth who never quite relaxed in tactility, had these been the actual lyrics, they would have made complete sense to me.

Actually, the extent of the phenomenon is made even clearer by the fact there is a second term to describe it: mondegreen.

Mondegreen was coined by an American writer called Sylvia Wright in an essay she wrote for Harper's Magazine in the 1950s.

In her explanation for her very conscious decision to coin mondegreen, Wright reveals her ignorance of the word otosis, which actually predates mondegreen by very many years.

Wright explained:

"When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques. One of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, Oh, where hae ye been? They hae slain the Earl Amurray, And Lady Mondegreen."

The ballad actually opens:

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands, O where hae ye been? They hae slain the Earl of Moray, And hae laid him on the green.

I think it may be that mondegreens do not always happen randomly. It is perfectly possible that by a kind of dissonance to the reality of a lyric, we subconsciously project personal meaning onto a song.

For example, I used to live in a beautiful beachside apartment in Sydney, Australia. About to emigrate to the UK, and part with my two great loves at the time - a carefree Scottish exchange student and surfing - I had a leaving party there. Late at night, looking over the waves, having had too much to drink, soon to leave permanently, my friend put a song on the stereo. It seemed painfully apposite:

No more ocean block for me
No more, no more
No more ocean block for me
Hours and sands are gone...

You can say I felt something of a twit when I discovered how badly I'd misheard the lyrics. It was no Scottish ballad. What I'd been listening to was actually one of the most haunting and humane protest songs ever written. "No more ocean block for me"? C'mon, it sounds like the moanings of a recently redundant Miami-based real estate agent.

I was certainly able to claim compensation, in a sense, from the fact that I'd inadvertently stumbled on a very beautiful song:

No more auction block for me No more, no more No more auction block for me Many thousands gone...

Can I claim?