Don't Sabotage Your Message by Mangling Your Meaning

Yonason Goldson
Thu, 20 Nov 2025 23:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

We all know them — those iconic song lyrics so entrenched in popular culture that virtually everyone can sing along. Even if you're not a connoisseur of classic rock, you certainly have your favorites. Maybe they include one of these:

"We built this city on sausage rolls." (Jefferson Starship)

"Sweet dreams are made of cheese." (Eurythmics)
Updated: Fri Nov 21, 2025

We all know them — those iconic song lyrics so entrenched in popular culture that virtually everyone can sing along. Even if you're not a connoisseur of classic rock, you certainly have your favorites. Maybe they include one of these:

"We built this city on sausage rolls." (Jefferson Starship)

"Sweet dreams are made of cheese." (Eurythmics)

There's nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do." (Toto)

Don't recognize them? Well, that's no surprise. In truth, the artists cited never recorded them.

These are just a few examples of famously misheard song lyrics. In case you can't identify the actual verses, here they are:

"We built this city on rock and roll."

"Sweet dreams are made of these."

"There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do."

The human mind really is remarkable. It automatically fills in gaps the way spellcheck and grammar software correct errors. Sometimes, our internal program's search for clarity and meaning yields absurdly comic results.

That's why, when we can't quite catch the lyrics, we may hear The Monkees lamenting, "Then I saw her face, now I'm gonna leave her," Elton John crooning, "Hold me closer, Tony Danza," and Bob Dylan musing, "These ants are my friends, they're blowin' in the wind."

There's a name for this phenomenon, which is this week's entry into the Ethical Lexicon:

Mondegreen (mon*de*green/ mon-di-green) noun

A word or phrase that results from mishearing another word or phrase, especially in a song or poem.

American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term back in 1954 from the line in a Scottish ballad, "laid him on the green," misinterpreted as "Lady Mondegreen." It provides a useful warning that sometimes the nonsense we hear coming out of other people's mouths is really a fabrication of our own imagination.

Speakers, as well as singers, sow confusion when they fail to clearly project their message, whether in the construction of their ideas or the enunciation of their words. It's not your fault that you can't understand them. But you do share the guilt if you presume that your reconstruction of their garbled delivery is accurate, even when the message you think you've received is incoherent.

Once communication breaks down, the damage is done regardless of who's at fault. In a 1977 speech, former President Jimmy Carter expressed interest in the national desires of the Polish people. His interpreter bungled the translation, declaring that the president was lusting after the Poles.

Mondegreens remind us that language barriers exist even within the same language. A prominent member of Congress appeared to be reading AI-generated captions when she referred to things being grown in "peach tree dishes." Lobbing this fat pitch to her adversaries across the aisle set them up, predictably, to attack her competence and credibility.

There are three reasons why communication fails. First, we haven't clearly formulated or articulated our message. Second, we're either too insecure or too arrogant to admit we haven't understood the message we've received. And third, we allow preconceptions, confirmation bias and faulty assumptions to dictate how we interpret those messages.

Of course, there's nothing new under the sun. King Solomon extolled the value of verbal clarity 3000 years ago when he observed, "Like golden apples on a silver tray is a word that carries home its true intent."

In the same way five-star restaurants value presentation as much as culinary excellence, communicating ideas with precision and eloquence makes those ideas digestible for our intended audience. Articulation of thought and speech saves our listeners from frustrated confusion, bolsters our efforts to achieve mutual understanding, and advances our goals of illumination and persuasion.

Ensuring that we have indeed said what we mean to say and heard what we think we've heard is part of the ethical discipline that preserves civil society. It might even be worthwhile to utter a quiet prayer for success before attempting to bridge the communication divide.

But this, too, requires care, lest we mangle our supplication on High by asking, "Lead me not into Penn Station."