Mishearings (Feedback)

Thanks for sharing your stories. Just like you have mishearings between Japanese people, we have them between native speakers of English, too. This is especially common in songs.

A recently released song by the Welsh group Stereophonics is called “Graffiti on the train,” but it’s really difficult to hear what the singer is saying unless you know the title. A radio show I listen to on the BBC had a long discussion about this a couple of weeks ago, and listeners were calling in to say what they had thought the singer was singing.

An interesting thing about listening is that our brains try to make sense of what we are hearing by referring to our database of knowledge about the language. Of course, this doesn’t work if the word turns out to be one that we didn’t know in the first place.

I am a big fan of the American country singer Carrie Underwood, and I particularly like the song “The night before life goes on.” No matter how many times I listened to it, though, I couldn’t figure out what she was saying in one line of the chorus. To me, it sounded like “Tomorrow she’ll be rolling down nights in Baton Rouge,” but that doesn’t make any sense.

When I checked, I found out that the lyric is “Tomorrow she’ll be rolling down I-10 Baton Rouge.” Obviously, “I-10” is the name of a road, but I had never heard of it, so I couldn’t make any sense of the lyric.

Anyway, here is some feedback on your comments.

And he fed the tea to my middle son and youngest son
And he gave the tea to my middle son and my youngest son.

their little quarrel quickly seemed to turn into a really big fight.
their little quarrel seemed as though it was going to turn into a really big fight.

Well,what do you think did actually each speaker intend to say?
What do you think each speaker actually intended to say?

but I’m happy to report that things are finally better.
Nice sentence.

Now he is enjoying himself like other university students.
If he’s like my students, that means he is not doing any studying at all!

Just two of us.
Just the two of us.

You seem to have had a great time in there!
You seem to have had a great time ther!

That’s all for today. Have a great weekend, and let me know if you have any questions.