When you mishear a lyric in a song, and even if the words seem a bit daft or total nonsense, they simply stay in your head and you always sing them that way.
That's called a mondegreen. Until recently, they were obscure, but mondegreens are now a tribal phenomenon, breeding numerous collectors' sites on the Internet, where victims register their self-mangled versions of pop lyrics and compare them, sometimes with dismay, to what the true lyrics were.
There is even a popular book, 'Scuse Me, While I Kiss This Guy (named after a widely-misheard line in the Jimi Hendrix song Purple Haze - "Scuse me, while I kiss the sky").
Remember the opening line to David Bowie's Space Oddity? Could it really have been "Clown control to Mao Tse-tung"? And The Eurythmics' "Sweet dreams are made of cheese"? Or that memorable line in the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, when "The girl with colitis goes by"?
Spare a thought for the unfortunate who misheard a line from Irene Cara's Flashdance ("Take your passion and make it happen") and spent much of his life singing it as "Take your pants down and make it happen".
Why are they called "mondegreens"?
The term was invented in 1954 by a writer, Sylvia Wright, who described how she had misheard part of a Scottish ballad, The Bonny Earl of Murray. "They hae slay the Earl of Murray/And Lady Mondegreen," was how Wright interpreted a stanza.
For years, Wright mused about the enigmatic Lady Mondegreen who had died so tragically with her liege. Only later did she discover that the villains had slain the Earl of Murray - and laid him on the green. - Sapa-AFP