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Through all the times I've listened to the Smiths' "How Soon is Now", I only just now, for the first time, heard "the son and the heir" instead of "the sun and the air". I know that sounds pretty bizarre, but I've always been terribly, terribly bad at properly hearing and understanding song lyrics unless I'm being specifically taught by repetition, or they are e-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-i-n-g--v-e-r-y--c-l-e-a-r-l-y. This particular mistake, being based on homophones, is at least far less spectacular than the ways I butchered Huey Lewis and the News in the seventh grade.
Shouldn't I have been able to do it by context, you say? That line makes no sense that way! Well, for one, that's hard when I don't know more than a few scattered words from the whole song; very little outside of the chorus. (Ironically, it was in fact context, although on a much narrower scale, which tipped me off today to what the words really were - because also for the first time, I heard the preposition of in front of "...nothing in particular." )
Even if I had had some more lines to try to fit it in with, the fact of its not making much sense wouldn't have fazed me much; there are many songs (witness the Cure, for example) where even proper hearing of the words doesn't give you a goddamn clue. So I had never been too worried about what the heck "the sun and the air" could have meant. It was at least internally consistent, and composed of ordinary English words - again in contrast to my mangles from younger years, which relied on supposing entirely nonsensical combinations of letters. (Why it did not occur to me that such would be unlikely to appear in professional music under most circumstances... well... just stupid?)
Shouldn't I have been able to do it by context, you say? That line makes no sense that way! Well, for one, that's hard when I don't know more than a few scattered words from the whole song; very little outside of the chorus. (Ironically, it was in fact context, although on a much narrower scale, which tipped me off today to what the words really were - because also for the first time, I heard the preposition of in front of "...nothing in particular." )
Even if I had had some more lines to try to fit it in with, the fact of its not making much sense wouldn't have fazed me much; there are many songs (witness the Cure, for example) where even proper hearing of the words doesn't give you a goddamn clue. So I had never been too worried about what the heck "the sun and the air" could have meant. It was at least internally consistent, and composed of ordinary English words - again in contrast to my mangles from younger years, which relied on supposing entirely nonsensical combinations of letters. (Why it did not occur to me that such would be unlikely to appear in professional music under most circumstances... well... just stupid?)