2025, Medicine, Music, Songs, Uncategorized

How’s That Again?

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We live-stream Classical MPR from our computer in the study. I drilled a hole in the wall that separates the study from the living room so that we could put a speaker wire through the wall and have a speaker play music into the living room. It works swell, although the volume control is on another speaker on top of the piano in the study. Sometimes it isn’t loud enough. My ears have been pretty plugged up due to spring pollens, and it is sometimes hard for me to hear well.

The other day I was sitting in the living room listening to MPR play a Beethoven Piano Concerto. The volume wasn’t as loud as I would have liked, but I was too lazy to get up and go into the study to crank it up. It was a lovely performance, and I was surprised to hear the announcer say at the end of the recording that the pianist was Elton John. Well, of course Sir Elton can play the piano, but I never heard that he had entered the classical sphere. I double checked the play list and saw that the pianist was actually a Chinese pianist named Huang Tiange. I don’t know how I translated that name into Elton John, but I think it was the way the last name was pronounced. I had a good giggle thinking about all the other absurd and wonderful combinations of people and activities I could think of, like Mick Jagger’s preschool curriculum. I need to take more Sudafed so this doesn’t happen again!

What have you misheard, and when have you been misunderstood? What are some weird and wonderful people and activity pairings that you can think up?

31 thoughts on “How’s That Again?”

    1. But then if you told my Aretha Franklin Sings Nessum Dorma I would not have believed it, but the recording is out there. She did it cold for Pavarotti when he got sick.

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  4. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    When I was quite small, and before I could read, I had so many “mis-hears”. There were Moon Beans and Sun Beans in particular. In Sunday School we sang a song about being a “Sun Bean” for Jesus (now I cannot remember the song, just the mis-hear) which left a powerful mental image in my head, to be sure. I could not figure out why Jesus wanted us to be beans. After I could read and see the words, then that stopped because I understood what it was supposed to be. Those Moon Beams and Sun Beams.

    But I also had my own theory about Perry Como’s song “Catch a Little Star.” My dad and I had one of our long and interesting discussions about the energy of the Sun and the stars. He explained to me that these bodies were hot gasses, which I understood. At the same time Perry Como’s song was out, so I decided that the words were wrong:

    Catch a little star and put it in your pocket
    Never let it fade away

    Was wildly wrong because my dad said starts were made of hot gasses. Therefore, if you caught a star and put it in your pocket it would burn your pants off. I took to singing my own lyrics loudly and off key:

    Catch a little star and put it in your pocket
    Burn your pants right off.

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  6. People routinely misunderstand me. They think I can hear what I am saying. I bet they think I am intelligent or stupid.
    Bad pairings. Lorne Greene singing anything. Many years ago I stumbled on a man online who had a collection of the worst albums. Number one on his list was that one of Lorne Greene. He had a couple of opera singers singing pop music. My imagined bad pairing: the Three Tenors sing Johnny Cash

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  9. In response to maybe Clyde, above, about mondogreen:

    Very early on, when Dale was still at MPR, I believe it was Barb in Blackhoof who did a guest post on mondogreens, and she summarized the origin of that word. Since I can’t find her post, here’s an explanation from Wiki:

    ” In a 1954 essay in Harper’s Magazine, Sylvia Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the last line of the first stanza from the ballad “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray” (from Thomas Percy’s 1765 book Reliques of Ancient English Poetry). She wrote:

    When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy’s Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

    Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
    Oh, where hae ye been?
    They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
    And Lady Mondegreen.[6]

    The correct lines are,
    “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray/ And laid him on the green.”
    Wright explained the need for a new term:

    The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.[6] “

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      1. Welcome to the no “like” club. Until recently, I could “like” the daily blog but none of the comments. Now I can’t even like the daily blog. There just doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the whims of WP.

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    1. In the comments on this post, I wrote about how I still have my Sony Walkman, and on the front under the Walkman name, it says “An essential item of modern life,” and I STILL take that at face value.

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  11. I’m constantly hearing things wrong when I have the radio on. I keep thinking I should write these things down, but of course I don’t and I forget them instantly.

    One thing that I’ve consistently misheard over the years is when someone says “now streaming on mpr.org”,I will hear “now screaming on mpr.org”.

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  12. john prine fan tells him she likes his happy enchilada song . he says no not me but she insists
    he asks how it goes . she say happy enchilada and you think youre gonna drown . oh he says… half an inch of water is the correct verse

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