Fred's Book Club: Right on the Pea Stain.

Greetings and salutations on this Hump Day, my friends, as we dive into another book in the Humpback Writers feature. Do the writers actually have hunched backs? Not that I'm aware of. We just went with the Humpback theme for Hump Day and now we regret it. Still, if you know of any writers who suffer from kyphosis, or are actual humpback whales, please alert me. 

This week's book celebrates the wonderful inability of people to understand the mumbling and bumbling of modern singers, or just the inability of people to listen properly to anything. Yes, we are discussing mondegreens. Webster's defines the mondegreen as "a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung," which comes "from the mishearing in a Scottish ballad of 'laid him on the green' as 'Lady Mondegreen'." And this book will convince you that people are very poor earwitnesses.

'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: And Other Misheard Lyrics is a fine collection of comically misheard words by author Gavin Edwards, who began collecting them for a piece in the now-defunct Details magazine. The title of our blog entry today comes from a mishearing of Cat Stevens's "Ride on the Peace Train." 

In the introduction to the book, Edwards writes, mondegreens "tend to be about primal concerns: food, sex, animals. Any misheard lyric is an impromptu audio Rorschach test. It can be alarming to discover that significant parts of our brains want pop songs to cover the lyrical topics of cheese, walruses, and clowns." He swears that all the mondegreens in this book are genuine, in that people really reported believing these were the actual lyrics of well-known songs.

Here are some classics from the pages, illustrated by collaborator Chris Kalb, with the correct lyric below:

Others that I'm sure you can guess include "Slow-Motion Walter, fire-engine guy" (Deep Purple), "Mice aroma" (the Knack), "Clown Control to Mao Tse-Tung" (David Bowie), and "Everybody's got a hungry horse" (Bruce Springsteen). 

Gavin Edwards has written many other books, including three more collections of mondegreens: He's Got the Whole World in His Pants, When a Man Loves a Walnut, and the inevitable Christmas collection, Deck the Halls with Buddy Holly. We applaud Edwards for helping popularize the idea of mondegreens, and promoting some classic examples with his writing. It's a true cultural contribution. 

Or, as the band Hot Chocolate once sang, at least according to this book, "I believe in milk and cows." And who can argue with that?