Messages from the fifth dimension

Those of you familiar with Pink Floyd's song, Comfortably Numb, may not recognize the following line from that song:

"A distant chipmunk on the horizon."

And rightly so. It isn't in there. However, to some, that is the line that immediately follows, "There is no pain, you are receding."

This sort of thing comes from people listening to, but not understanding, the lyrics of a song, poem, or other. It is human nature to try to make sense of what is heard, and it is a well-known scientific fact that, if a person doesn't understand what is said (for example, if their vocabulary doesn't include the word or phrase), they will translate the words into the nearest set of sounds that make sense to them.

Sometimes, the problem is pronounciation, always a problematic thing with rock musicians. For example, for years I thought Creedence Clearwater Revival was singing, "There's a bathroom on the right." (I am not making this up.) I am embarrassed to admit how long it took for me to finally figure out that what they were really singing was "There's a bad moon on the rise." My only excuse is that this is how my mother sang the song, and I didn't think she could be wrong.

At the time, I also didn't know that the name of the song was "Bad Moon." In fact, it was when I first learned that the name of the song was "Bad Moon" that the penny dropped and I realized what they had been singing all along. Until then, I thought "There's a bathroom on the right" was one of those strange, surrealistically random phrases that rock musicians were fond of putting into their songs in that era.

Mishearing song lyrics (and other such things) isn't new, though it has become more popular to codify and collect the mishearings. There is even a term for misheard lyrics: mondegreens. If you Google for the word "mondegreen," you'll find any number of Web sites devoted to the topic (and explaining the origin of the term), though my favorite misheard lyrics site, which you won't find by searching for mondegreen, is http://www.amiright.com/.

While checking out that site, I was relieved to find that I was not the only one who thought that Creedence was singing about a bathroom on the right. Though chipmunk lovers everywhere may be disappointed to learn that that Pink Floyd lyric should be "a distant ship's smoke on the horizon."