You know when you mishear the lyrics of a song and end up singing your own version of it? Like they way you might end up singing “Scuse me while I kiss this guy” while listening to Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze?
Or how there’s a line in that song Blinded By The Light that sounds like “wrapped up like a douche in the middle of the night”? That’s called a mondegreen.
I wonder if there’s a word like that for other things you might mishear or get wrong. For example, until embarrassingly recently I thought The Siege of Ennis was called The Siege of Venice and would wonder every so often what the connection was between Irish set dancing and the Italian city. Morto.
It turns out that I actually have loads of embarrassing slip ups like that though, which I’m now going to shamefacedly share with you.
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For years I thought that the phrase “fair dues” was “fair juice”, until I saw it written down and realised my mistake. Luckily when you say it out loud with an Irish accent, they sound pretty much the same. Kind of. Stop judging me!
When I used to read Bliss and Sugar as a young wan, I’d look at the fashion spreads and read about what shops all the different clothes were from and kept seeing things like “Necklace: Model’s own.” So for quite some time I thought that Model’s Own was a shop in England.
When I was a child with a typically messy bedroom, quite often my Mam would come in and exclaim “This room looks like a bomb hit it!” So I thought a bombhitit was a really messy place, or a dump of some sort. I was quite young though, in fairness.
Again, when I was younger and reading teenage magazines, every so often there would be a correction or a remark from the editor in an article that went something like: (Blah blah correction – Ed) and I used to wonder who the hell this Ed guy thought he was and why he kept butting into people’s articles. How rude of him! Cringe.
Right, now it’s your go. What have your mondegreens and “fair juice” moments been?
