Mondegreen!

[jeshyr]

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!!

Sent from my iPhone

Comments

[ephemera]

It's endlessly interesting to me what people hear out of the same musical source - that MOOC sounds interesting, too.

[jeshyr]

It was fascinating, though I didn't finish it!!!

It was a 6 week course and I did great in weeks 1-4 but the workload was WAY higher in weeks 5 and 6 and of course at the same time I got way sicker so that didn't work ... since the videos are still available though I'm still working through it, the point is to learn stuff not to get a certificate so it's still good for me :)