Your Nose
I was driving around with my dad over the winter break and the radio was playing “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac. The chorus of that song is “You’ll know.” My dad was singing along and so was I, at least in my head. At one point I realized that the words that I was thinking weren’t quite right. I was expecting my dad to sing “your nose” as the corus.
I think that distraction played a big part in this error. I was the one driving and was just making a difficult turn in traffic, and so my mind definitely wasn’t focused on the words of the song.
The words I was thinking of were in many ways quite similar to the ones in the chorus. They start with the same letters, and therefore fall into the same sets of cohorts. Also they are all one sillable words with similar sounds and silable structures. But why the lexical item /nose/ was the one I chose from that cohort, I may never know.
A few questions:
1) Did you believe the lyrics were “your nose”? If so, then you’ve got a nice mondegreen to report to add to the growing collection of misheard lyrics.
2) Did you know the right lyrics and just catch yourself producing the wrong ones? If so, you’ve got a cool speech error. I think it’s cool that your inner monitor caught the speech error and that you were aware of it. I make lots of speech errors in my head, even more than the myriad that come out during class!