Garbled Transmissions

Ever play the game “Whisper Down the Line” when you were a kid? That’s when one person whispers something to another, who in turn whispers it to the next person, continuing down the line until everyone has heard it. The purpose of this game is to see if the message survived intact, word for word, after having been repeated several times. Usually, it doesn’t.

Sometimes it doesn’t take this much for what someone has said or sung to be misunderstood by a listener.

Children, especially, tend to have “creative ears”, many times with amusing results. I can remember hearing reports on the news about euthanasia. Considering that I was a little kid during the sixties, what my ears heard was “Youth in Asia”, and I thought they were talking about kids in Vietnam. You have to admit that it made sense. I also heard electoral vote as “electrical vote”, which I thought meant voting by machine. Again, perfectly logical.

My creative hearing extended to music as well. All during school, we frequently sang “God Bless America” in music class. For the longest time, I thought the actual lyrics were, “And guide her, through the night, with a light from a BULB”. It made perfect sense to me.

Of course, adults mishear things as well, for a variety of reasons. Some of the most common reasons are being hard of hearing, but fairly often it’s because of regional dialects. Back in the sixties, VW put out a car called “Karmann Ghia”. Growing up with an r-dropping New England accent, my mind pictured this as “Common Gear”. Years later, when I first moved to my current home, I’d hear these radio commercials promoting “Mills on Wills”. It took me a moment to realize that they meant “Meals on Wheels”.

Sometimes the confusion comes with not the words themselves, but the emphasis. Take the song “Home on the Range”. The line, “Seldom is heard a discouraging words”, can be taken two ways. It could either mean that “seldom” is a discouraging word heard often, or it could mean seldom does one hear discouraging words.

And this brings me to one of the biggest sources of garbed transmissions -- music. All sorts of music is heard in ways that the singers never intended, usually with hilarious results. Here are a few of my favorites:

Louis Armstrong -- What a Wonderful World

The actual words: “The bright blessed days, the dark sacred nights”
What I heard: “The bright blessed days, the dogs say goodnight”

CCR -- Bad Moon on the Rise

The actual words: “There’s a bad moon on the rise”
What I heard: “There’s a bathroom on the right”

Elton John -- Island Girl

The actual words: “Island Girl, what you wanted with the white man’s world”
What I heard: “Island girl, what you wanted with your wife’s Aunt Pearl”

Manfred Mann -- Blinded By the Light”

The actual words: Blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night”
What I heard: Blinded by the light, wrapped up like a douche, had a boner in the night”.

Well, at least for that last one, I think my words made about as much sense as the original ones.

Here’s a funny collection of misheard lyrics I found that you might enjoy:

http://www.kissthisguy.com/