Mondegreen wisdom

When singers don't have good articulation or when the mix is too instrument-heavy I find when I reassemble the babble into something nearly intelligible it doesn't seem quite relevant to the rest of the song. (I often must look up lyrics online, and I find that songs that seemed muddy back in the 60-70's are still muddy today--it wasn't just the static-y radio.)

I did the same with speech when young and unfamiliar with exotic uses of words, and do the same now that I'm older and people mumble more.

Sometimes the revision is better than the original. A line from the religious controversies of a few centuries ago ran something like: "Confess a man against his will; he's of the same opinion still." Perfectly true; compelling somebody to recite a creed doesn't make him believe it. But when I was 10 I'd not heard the word confess used that way, and I reconstructed the lines as "Convince a man against his will; he's of the same opinion still." That is an unpleasant indictment--and every day we run across that kind of stubborn refusal to see.

A rattle of dishes disguised "self deluded" as "self diluted," which is a polite way to describe lives that should have overflowed with works of grace and kindness--but instead drip self-absorption.

Maybe there are advantages--but I wish people wouldn't mumble.