I loved the misheard lyrics story that Matthew Malcolm shared a while back, in which his 6-year-old daughter asked for a copy of the song “Free Cow” and became increasingly frustrated when her parents seemed not to know what song she was talking about.
The song, it turned out, was this one:
I actually do have a tendency to “free cow”/freak out at the start of each semester, even when I am teaching classes that I have taught pretty much every semester for the last decade. I am not an extrovert, and no matter how many times I have done it before, there is still something nerve-wracking for us introverts about getting up in front of a new bunch of people, even though we may learn to hide it well. I also tend to get anxious before deadlines, even though I almost never miss them, and if I do it isn’t by much.
As a new academic year starts, but also just in general, I thought it might be interesting to ask what makes you freak out.
And back to the subject of misheard lyrics, there is a web site dedicated to the one example that is the focus of this post. Malcolm’s daughter isn’t the only person to have heard it that way, apparently. If you misheard “Freak Out” by Chic as “Free Cow” or have other funny examples of misheard song lyrics, feel free to share those too. And if you missed them, check out the ones I shared earlier this month as part of a conversation with Rafael Rodriguez.
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