Dear Readers:
Dr. Ink was stylin’ and profilin’ around town in his Patriot Blue PT Cruiser listening to an old John Fogerty CD. The former front man for Creedence sounds great in these recordings of live performances, but one phrase in one song caught Doc’s attention.
It occurs in the song “Bad Moon Risin’.” And it comes in the hook: “There’s a bad moon on the rise.” Many of Doc’s contemporaries have sung that line, driving along on a spooky night, radio blastin’, headlights shining on a twisting road.
“There’s a bad moon on the rise.”
Unless Doc needs his hearing checked, Fogerty, at least at the end of one verse, sings the phrase this way: “There’s a bathroom on the right.” Dr. Ink is not kidding. “There’s a bathroom on the right.”
Did Doc hear what he thought he heard? Was Fogerty being playful? Did this phrase fall into the category of misheard song lyrics? Dr. Ink once owned a book that contained a long catalogue of them: Jimi Hendrix sang “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky,” but some heard it as “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”
This tendency goes beyond music. Doc’s grad school roommate, Ron Sudol, said that when he was a kid he always envisioned that a gigantic lion sat on the middle of the planet. This came from a mishearing of the meaning of the equator. A teacher told him the equator was an imaginary line around the middle of the Earth. Ron heard “an imaginary lion.”
Another friend of Doc’s, whose father was named Howard, came to think her father was God. Why? Because of a mishearing of “The Lord’s Prayer”: “Our Father who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name.”
Doc wonders: Does this mishearing of language have a name? If you misspeak, we call it a malapropism, named after the character Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s play “The Rivals.”
[ Is there a name for this mishearing? Has it ever happened to you? ]
