Wumbaba

A long day.  And it was another that had me waking up 5 minutes before my alarm....

Lots of debugging today, which was fine - I was working through my test plan and fixing typos.  Everything is pretty much on course to go live when it needs to.

And then I had my German lesson.  We're currently working on my speech rhythms and getting some colour into how I speak.  My German is good but I focus more on getting the pronunciation of things right than getting any personality into what I say.  As a consequence, I have a tendency, when I read out loud, to be a very flat speaker.  That comes of not knowing the text very well and just being focused on getting it right.  must be dull as ditchwater to listen to.

Anyway after murdering three poems*, we went for a text about Mondegreens.  That's where people mishear song lyrics.  And it was really fun.  Reading about a German couple singing along to You Sexy Thing where she thought Errol Brown was singing "I believe in knuckles" and the bloke being sure it was "I believe in Malcolm" made me laugh.

A not-safe-for-work website if you want to enjoy other misheard lyrics is here.  It takes its title from a famously misheard Hendrix lyric.

And the title of today's Blip comes from a famously misheard German lullaby „Der Mond ist aufgegangen“ by Matthias Claudius. The listener had seriously misheard „der weiße Nebel wunderbar“ as something not quite politically correct.  The polite bit is Wumbaba.

Der Panther, Stufen, Im Nebel - they are in German.