Doubt that John Fogarty and Creedence Clearwater Revival, or even the songwriters themselves (Eddie Miller, Dub Williams and Robert Yount--credit where credit is due) ever imagined a young Missouri farm boy listening to “Bad Moon on the Rise” and hearing inexplicably a line about a “bathroom on the right.” That’s what I heard, though, for years, probably well into my thirties, every time that song came on the radio and even when I put the actual vinyl record on the turntable. It never made any sense to me, but then, a lot of rock lyrics never made “sense,” per se. (Can we say “doo wa diddy diddy dum diddy do”?).
Probably everybody can remember their own personal “misheard lyrics.” My ex-wife’s, for instance, was “It’s so scary,” which was how she and her sister always heard til Tuesday’s “voices carry.”
And then there are mispronounced words--read as well as spoken. In sixth grade our reading teacher read “Great Expectations” to us, and about every third or fourth word seemed (to me, at least) something that sounded like “melon collie,” as if a fat Lassie had somehow inserted herself into the story. It wasn’t until I got hold of a copy of the book that I discovered that the “melon collie” was what I had been “hearing” in my head as “ma-LAN-cha-lee,” spelled “melancholy.”
I thought about “ma-LAN-cha-lee” tonight when I was transcribing a “history and physical” dictated by an ESL physician whose English is actually pretty good. When he got to the medication list, he mentioned something that sounded like “ma-LAT-a-neen.” I’d gotten pretty much everything he’d said up to that point without much trouble, despite his accent, but ran into a wall on that one. I went to the FDA site and plugged in about every 3-letter combination I could think of, still could come up with no likely possibility. I gave up, inserted a blank, then before sending the report, re-listened to it and went through some other mental gyrations that I won’t even try to describe, and finally it clicked: He was talking about “melatonin.”
Language can be slippery, as much for the speaker as for the listener.
Listening to dictated medical reports sometimes can be like looking at one of those “magic pictures” that at first glance (and second, third, fourth, etc.) seem like just a multicolored, psychedelic yet organized splatter, then morph into a 3-dimensional image.
Sometimes it is like one of those “tip-of-the-tongue” moments when you can almost grab the word you’re looking for, but not QUITE. It’s like you hear it for one infinitesimal fraction of a second, then it gets away, lost in a blur of sound, surfacing fleetingly and tantalizingly just out of your audio “reach,” like a dolphin’s fin appearing and disappearing and reappearing in successive flashes amid the ocean waves.
And sometimes it is like an audio kaleidoscope, one of those little tubes that you hold up to your eye, peer into and see bits of colored glass forming one symmetrical pattern at the other end, then you give the tube a quarter-twist and the bits of glass reform into a completely different, yet still symmetrical pattern.
It’s like hearing “there’s a bathroom on the right” perfectly clearly, then giving the tube a quarter-twist, and suddenly hearing “there’s a bad moon on the rise,” also with perfect clarity--only now you will never be able to listen to the same song, same artist, and hear “there’s a bathroom on the right,” ever again, just as you would never be able to “un-see” the 3D image hidden in that psychedelic magic picture puzzle once you actually saw it.
Don’t get me started on how “black” and “white” can be virtually indistinguishable to the ear.
