Archive for September, 1998
Joe Robins provides a pointer to another archive of misheard lyrics that I hadn't previously known about. It includes entertaining stories about how the submitters found out they were wrong. I forgot to mention some other items I misheard for years: Where the wild mountain Ty rose around the blue wind Heather... Really: Where the […]
Most of the time when I mishear a song lyric, I don't hear anything intelligible, just nonsense syllables. Even when I do hear a real but incorrect word, it's often a minor, uninteresting change. Fortunately, other people are better than I at mishearing entertainingly, which has spawned a small industry of lists of misheard lyrics. […]
Denis Hirschfeldt provides more detailed information than I had previously had access to about the origin of the sol-fa syllables. He notes that the syllables come from a hymn for St. John the Baptist, which Britannica tells me was composed by Guido d'Arezzo (apparently to help teach people to sight-read music). (I keep trying to […]
"California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot If you ain't got the do re mi." —Woody Guthrie Solmization (also known as sol-fa) is the use of syllables (such as do, re, and mi) to indicate musical notes. You […]
As we're confronted with an ever-vaster quantity of unsorted online information, one of the greatest challenges of coming decades may be determining ways to find a given needle of information in the haystack of the Web. Indexing is the process of providing multiple topic-based entry points to a collection of data—specifically, providing a way for […]
In the movie Airplane, a couple of characters converse in Jive, a parody of the overblown black slang featured in the "blaxploitation" movies of the '70s. In 1986, Daniel Klein and Clement Cole created a software filter that would take ordinary text as input and translate it into some approximation of Jive. A variety of […]