If I substitute a word facetiously, it can be hard to get rid of. For years the winter hat with built-in visor, named for the Crimean War battle, has been called a "Baklava" by me, such that I have to remember not to.
Worst example I know of was Jimmy Carter speaking of Hubert Horatio Hornblower at Humphrey's funeral. The inner circle must always have called him that, and it came back to bite.
For easily 20 years now, I have been singing to myself:
"Grout! Grout!
Can't dig it out!
Think of all the things
You can fill with grout!
Come on.
It's better than glue!
Come on."
Which is from a combination of sources oudemia might remember.
If it doesn't have a visor, it's not a balaclava? I didn't know that.
Ooh, here's one that I have never mentioned to anyone, because it is just plain weird: "Clap along if you know that happiness is for Jews."
Remember to provide enough details that the rest of us know what on earth you're talking about.
Oh yeah, and the new Taylor Swift song includes these lines:
"Apers going to ape, ape, ape, ape, ape, ape
and gapers going to gape, gape, gape, gape, gape, gape
and papers going to pape, pape, pape, pape, pape, pape"
etc.
That one will be easy to acquire.
No points in my head at least for substitutions that rely on common meter (Amazing Grace). That seems to be getting very commonplace.
Not funny or clever, but I cannot keep the product name Better Than Bullion in my head and always call it I Can't Believe It's Not Bullion.
4: My best friend and I in high school had a game where we would change the words of songs to make them Jewishly-themed. So there were obvious things like "She loves Jews, yeah yeah yeah," but also "I'll send an SOS to the mohel." She's Chasidic now.
In 8th grade math class, I remember singing "I'm completing the square!" to "Romancing the Stone."
There is a nearby suburb called Aspinwall that I kept calling Aspinwald. I couldn't get it right until one day my wife said, "It's not a concentration camp." That did the trick.
10: I Can't Believe It's Not Bullion - rebranded fool's gold.
"...$150 million in stolen Kuwaiti bullion."
"What, those little cubes you make soup out of?"
"No, not those little cubes you make soup out of."
Jammies is much more of a malaprops guy than a mental tic person like me, but one that cracks me up is that one time, a (super tiresome) colleague complained that people frequently insert an extra "s" into the name of her town of "New Braunfels" and say "New Braunsfels" instead. Since hearing that, Jammies compulsively adds more and more s'es every time he says it: "New Brausnsfels" - and just out of an absentminded memory that there's something going on with the esses, not out of cutesy-ness.
When I was a teenager a good friend's 5-y-o-ish cousin liked to sing his own special version of Blue Tail Fly, where for "jimmy crack corn, and I don't care," he'd swap in "chicken fart pie ...". 30+ years later this still burbles up into my consciousness far more frequently than I'd like.
16: A classmate in eighth grade had a set of really stupid lyrics to the Ode to Joy that I cannot lose. "Harvey bit his toenails while he walked on through the cell-ar door, Harvey bit his nose off while he listened to the ra-dio..."
Thanks, Michael! Thirty years of that rattling around in my head.
Highly offensive racist lyrics to the Daniel Boone theme song will pop into my head 40+ years after I heard them in elementary school.
Not quite the same, but I recently discovered that The Unfortunate Lad/Lass, the old ballad that underlies both Streets of Laredo and Saint James Infirmary, was originally sung to the tune of Spanish Ladies. Now you can sing Streets of Laredo to Spanish Ladies easily enough, because they're very similar and you only don't notice because they're usually sung at totally different tempos, but I've wasted half the day trying to fit Saint James Infirmary to it, which is harder though possible, and it's turning into a massive earworm and it's driving me mad.
Of course everyone knows the alternate lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Actually, I don't exactly ''Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school/ We have somethinged every something, we have broken every rule," etc.
Pets At Home (a big pet supplies chain) + Toys R Us = Pets R Us. Every bloody time.
I do know that one.
Also the Jingle Bells version with lyrics that show insufficient respect for Batman.
I wonder what would happen today if a kid came into school singing, "Met her behind the door with a loaded .44 and teacher ain't teaching no more."
21 reminds me of one of my oldest ones, from childhood:
"I don't wanna grow up, I'm a Toy-s-us kid, made with potatoes and skins that are real."
I can't remember what product the "potatoes and skins that are real" is from.
I'm having a hard time retrieving mine, given that it seems to be a near-constant presence. I swap out Snow Peas and Snoopies, but that's also my go-to example of this.
Most recently, taking the boy to the rocks and minerals collection at the natural history museum produced "Olivine in the vitrine! Olivine on the scene! It's green! It's super keen!"
2: Less creatively, "Shout! Shout! gets the stains out..." which seems like it really should have been used in a commercial.
I get the Muppets song stuck in my head every time I see the word "phenomena"
32 reminds me of the time when I was in high school chemistry. We were discussing a nanometer when one classmate said it to meter of that muppets song. Then we kept doing that with other science-y things until we ran out of ideas.
24: Tato Skins from Keebler. With baked potato appeal.
20: Our version of that was from a different hymn.
Joy to the world, the teacher's dead
We barbecued her head
Don't worry about the body
We flushed it down the potty
Don't worry about the toes
We stuffed them up her nose
(rest forgotten)
32, 33: "Pajamas on!" sung to that was for a while the indicator that it was time for the boy to get ready for bed.
32: Likewise. Thanks for the earworm. Do doo be-do-do.
It has long been my position that I will refuse any and all invitations to karaoke, with the exception of the "Manah Manah" song.
"Pajamas on!" sung to that was for a while the indicator that it was time for the boy to get ready for bed.
After storytime, to the tune of the Lone Ranger song, I sing:
Go to bed
Go to bed
Go to bed, bed, bed
Go to bed
Go to bed
Go to bed, bed, bed
Go to bed
Go to bed
Go to bed, bed, bed
EVERYBODY? Go to bed, bed, bed.
It's fun to sing as fast as you can.
When the shark bites
With his teeth dear
When MacHeath is
Back in town
I simply remember my favorite things
And let my cement bag drop down
And of course "Stand By Me" to the tune of the Russian/Soviet national anthem.
Old Nat King Cole hit: "They tried to sell us egg fu yung"
Pat the booty!
Pat it to the left!
Pat it to the right!
Pat it all morning and pat it all night!
Pat the booty!
to the tune of Tutti Fruiti with my wife doing her inimitable James Brown imitation -- part of my stepdaughter's bedtime ritual.
Some people try to pick up a werewolf riding a scooter
This never happened to Pablo Neruda
Not in New York
2: The basement men's room in my doctoral department had/has the first line of that written in tiny letters along the grout in a toilet stall. Probably forty people have joined in with their own grout puns, most of which I can't remember. Grout balls of fire. Grouter limits.
We have "Hollywood Tan" in the strip malls around here, with the jingle "You don't have to go to Hollywood /// To get a Hollywood tan!"
And we also have "Holiday Hair" in the strip malls. "You don't have to go to holiday / To get a holiday hair!" the jingle should go.
After storytime, to the tune of the Lone Ranger songWilliam Tell Overture, I sing:
We sang in school to the tune of "John Brown's body"
"He jumped without a parachute from 20,000 feet"
and
"He landed on the runway like a mess of strawberry jam!"
but I can't remember the other verses.
"They put him in a bottle and they sent him home to mum!"
"She stuck him on the mantlepiece for all her fiends to see!"
(We sang the second verse as "They scraped him off the runway...")
"Gilligan's Island" and "Amazing Grace" also can be sung to "Stairway to Heaven."
Most (all?) of Emily Dickinson's Emily Dickinson's life work goes with either "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke," or "The Yellow Rose of Texas".
The one I'd always heard is that gilligans island scans to any Emily Dickenson poem.
52/53: threw her off the roof with a bomb that went ka-poof
And
Hit her in the bean with a rotten tangerine
are the only two verses I can remember now.
48: there were many such puns in bathrooms at my undergraduate institution.
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Oh god, I love keeping track of how insufferably self-righteous my one particular colleague can get on FB:
Wonderful discussion of racism and privilege today in Women's Studies. We did the exercise that's sometimes done by lining students up and having them step forward or backward as they answer various questions on privilege. I am not comfortable asking students to out themselves that way, so I just have them record points based on their responses, and then we figure out who has the highest privilege score. Today's winner (with a score of 15/20) was no surprise to anyone, but many students were shocked that my score was 6.
Maybe s/he only got a 6 out of 20, but colleague is passing just fine as a highly privileged white professor.
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48, 59: There are many such puns in restrooms on the campus lourdes is probably describing.
60: Link to the scale so we can all take it.
Ooh, yes please. I'm stuck "escorting" a repair technician who is telling me about the minor heart attack he had last week. We are in a small, stuffy room, and he just keeps talking.
This sort of thing, although the linked Privilege Walk has 25 available points, instead of 20.
"I'm not supposed to be back at work this soon, but oh well."
"I'm not supposed to use my left arm. That's where they put the catheter."
"They didn't put me under all the way, and apparently I started to get up as they were placing the stent."
"Emergency triple bypass followed by a follow up single bypass and stent revision."
He can't finish the repair soon enough.
64: I pretty much got all the steps back.
63, 65: He's back at work after a bypass? That's pretty quick.
67: The bypass was his last major heart attack, five years ago. The one last week was minor ("on the steps of the Capitol"). "The doc said the bypasses and stents are all in good shape."
That's a relief. I was afraid he was going to die with his arms inside your office's copier or something.
66: Me too. In fact, I kept losing track how privileged I am, trying to simultaneously hold a conversation in real life.
24 Lately I forget things so easily that I am certain I'm dying of early-onset something, but I have infinite recall for certain things like this. Tato Skins. "Tato skins got baked potato appeal/They're made from potatoes and skins that are real."
Yesterday I looked on youtube to find a sitcom theme song that occasionally pops into my head and couldn't find it. I googled it and there were only four episodes, in 1986. Now ask me the name of the client I wrote an impassioned plea for last month!
42: Because I did not know from Kurt Weill when I was whatever age this aggrieved anecdote is about, I will never hear "Mac the Knife" and not think "It's a good time/for the great taste/of MacDonald's" which, somewhere in my innermost me, I feel to be the original.
As long as I'm beating a dead thread, did everyone learn a different version of "Emily Dickinson's poems can all be sung to the tune of [song]?"
So far I have heard of
-The Yellow Rose of Texas
-The Gilligan's Island theme song
-oh there was a third one
This is almost certainly in TFA.
Um or it's in this very thread.
- Smells Like Teen Spirit
- O Fortuna
- Die Erlkonig
- The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer
You can totally do the poem "Mary had a little lamb" to the tune of "House Of The Rising Sun"...
54: This totally got me stinkeyed by a priest at a hootenanny. We were playing "House of the Rising Sun." He demonstrated that "Amazing Grace" could be sung to it. So I had to demonstrate that "Gilligan's Island" could too.
74: if the sitcom was Down To Earth, we are back to twins.
No, "Better Days." But I'm on on youtube now and I totally remember this awful, awful theme song for Down to Earth. Angelical, spectacle, and hysterical do not rhyme.
Oh good there are complete episodes on YouTube. This can't possibly turn into a tedious compulsive waste of an evening.
Back down to earth to teach the Prestons lessons.
Someone someone Dwayne and JJ too.
But she was struck down by a trolley, golly.
Said goodbye in nineteen twenty and two. ( toodle-oo, toodle-oo)
Maybe I'm misremembering. (Ethel in heaven awaited patiently, to earn her wings an be, an angel fancy free. Sixty years later, the opportunity CAME TRUE! Twenty three skidoo!) ok I'll stop.
The dad is Darren II from Bewitched.
I figured out Martha plimpton on TGW after a few episodes and was way too pleased with myself.
Just for context a few non-ballad-stanza Dickinson poems: [1] [2] [3]
grout puns, most of which I can't remember. Grout balls of fire. Grouter limits.
By now, almost certainly, "I... AM... GROUT".
My Facebook is showing an ad for I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. Creepy, FB. If there's a Better than Bullion ad next time, I'll know how closely they're reading.