Since childhood, I have been particularly adept at misreading and mishearing things. Either I look at the text too quickly and read "Sacred Beef Tips" on a menu instead of the rather more prosaic "seared beef tips," or I hear something utterly ridiculous in the lyrics of almost any given song.
One that I particularly remember from childhood, when it was still popular on the Baltimore airwaves and I heard it on WCAO while riding (un-child-seated, because this was 1974) in my parents' ginormous Chevrolet BelAir, was "Mrs. Robinson." When Simon and Garfunkel get all funky (see what I did there) and sing "koo koo ka choo, Mrs. Robinson," I heard "you kooky Jew, Mrs. Robinson." Which seemed a bit nasty to me, but then, I suppose then as now, a nice Jewish lady from Pikesville could be kooky if she wanted to be. "Robinson" is a pretty WASPy name, though.
I seemed to be at my second-hand malapropic best with Christmas songs. One might think this was just a little kid's misunderstanding, or misinterpretation, of things he didn't recognize. Oh, no. I don't even have that excuse.
One that stands out for sheer "How did you get there, kid?" is The Little Drummer Boy. While popular to hate now, it was beloved in the 1970s. Of course kids loved it; I still do. The existence of a particularly saccharine TV special probably helped. Anyway, there's a line "The ox and lamb kept time..." Which I heard as "Lexington time." This really makes no sense. I knew what oxen and lambs were. Maybe there was a skip on the record we had? Or maybe I was weirdly associating it with Lexington street, one of the big shopping streets of downtown Baltimore? Or maybe I was just completely spaced out after sneaking some of my dad's eggnog.
Happy Holidays threw me with "may the calendar keep bringing Happy Holidays to you." Because, of course, the p and b sounds of "keep bringing" do sort of elide, so I heard "keep ringing," and since when do calendars ring? In my own defense, the idea of a calendar actually bringing something of its own volition is a little weird anyway.
Winter Wonderland gave me "later on, we'll kinspire as we dream by the fire." Yeah, I don't get where that came from, either. I'm sure that at some point in childhood I learned the word "conspire," so where I got the non-word "kinspire" and managed to confuse myself about what it might mean, when I could substitute a perfectly good word, which I knew and was actually the correct word, and derive meaning... hell, who knows. Maybe it was the eggnog again.
Hands down in the Christmas "Dan's brain 1, Reality 0" scorecard is Sleigh Ride. Sleigh Ride (which, like Winter Wonderland and Jingle Bells, is really just a song about winter and has nothing to do with Christmas) holds the line "It'll really be like a picture print/By Currier and Ives. Did I hear this, like a normal person? No. What I heard was "Furry-Ur and I."
Doesn't make sense, does it? Now, you may be trying to help me out, here. You're thinking, "well, Dan, you probably didn't know about the famous lithographers at the time.
Except that I did. I remember seeing those prints. My mother's everyday china was a pattern popular at the time that had freaking Currier and Ives prints in the pattern. So yes, I knew who they were and managed to mishear it all the same, substituting something that made no bloody sense whatsoever. I could even have been forgiven for thinking "furrier," a word that I also knew because there were several of them downtown (though not on Lexington street). But no, I concocted some damned weird thing all on my own. I don't remember what I thought it was...a pet? a monster? But, "Furry-Ur and I" it was. The reality of the lyric, even a possibly understandable mishear, and I managed to cough up...I don't know, the beloved Furry-Ur of yore? The lovable fuzzy emblem of the long-lost Mesopotamian city-state?
My own deranged mishearings aside, the one that I still think takes the all time cake wasn't that of a Christmas song, but German new wave. When I was in high school, both the English and German versions of 99 Luftballon were popular. I knew a girl who insisted that the words to the German version were not, in fact, "neun und neunzig luftballon" but "ninety nine shaved loop balloons." What, you might ask, is a loop balloon? And why would anyone shave one, much less shave ninety nine of them?
Only the Furry-Ur will ever know.
