Arnold Zwicky's Blog

At lunch today, a couple at the next table were engaged in some discussion in which the Army was mentioned. Then one of them went into a riff on what I heard as uncensored chaplains, who were free to use any language they wanted (obscenity, racial slurs, whatever). This struck me as bizarre, so I tuned in more closely.

Turns out the topic at that point was communications on the net, and eventually I realized the speaker was talking about uncensored chatrooms.

Just that slight original topic-biasing led me into the mishearing. Once lodged in my mind, it was hard to shake, and for a while I kept mishearing later occurrences of uncensored chatrooms, even as they became increasingly unlikely in context.

These things can stick. Some mondegreens can be annoyingly persistent, even when you know the truth. I’m still led astray by the lyrics of “Blinded by the Light“.

This entry was posted on May 31, 2011 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Errors, Mishearings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.