I said, "Do you speak-a my language?"

Yesterday, I mentioned in passing that as a child I'd happily accepted the word "obyjyful" without ever parsing it into the phrase "oh be joyful". I suppose it's not surprising, really - as a baby, you learn to talk by imitating the peculiar sounds that taller people make at you. At learning-to-talk age, analysis isn't usually a strong point and you've not yet caught on to the idea that grown-ups may not be carefully using words in only their most correct of contexts. And, indeed, may be blatantly making words up to fool you.

Similarly, when picking up the words to the songs that trickled steadily out of our record player, I strung together syllables which sounded approximately correct, without ever pausing to wonder whether they made sense. Sometimes, hearing a song in later life, I've been stunned to realise what a complete hash I made of some fairly simple sentences. In some cases, I just matched up the words I heard to words I knew.

According to me (aged 6 or so) the chorus to Go Slow on one of my favourite records (which was a Spinners double album, incidentally) went:

It's bad when you touch me, ice and gale, worse when you touch me, lover-bear

... and it simply never occurred to me to wonder what on earth a bear was doing in the song.

I now hear this as:

It's bad when you touch me, icy gale, worse when you touch me, love affair

However, having attacks of the mondegreens isn't in the least uncommon. Often, as you get older, you realise that what you're singing is daft and reconsider it.

( An old favourite, revisited )