Mondegreen!

Lyrics - especially misheard lyrics - are such fascinating psycholinguistic phenomena ...

Lying in bed today listening to my copy of Miss Saigon. I don't know how many times I've heard it but I wore out my cassette version of the original cast recording with my second favourite Filipino on it [*]. Halfway through there's a lyric in the song Why God Why that I had always heard as 'I don't believe in even' and today my brain suddenly resolved it to 'I don't believe anything'. Wow!!

I have been working this month on a free MOOC course on songwriting a lot of which is about settings lyrics, and the word 'anything' in that like is badly mis-set - it comes out with the emphasis on the middle syllable 'anYthing' which is really really not how it's ever pronounced in English. I wonder if thinking about that so much is what made my head suddenly resolve it?

Brains are fascinating...


Cheers
R

[*] Lea Salonga. Like all fans of Dreamwidth, Afuna is my favourite!!

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