Last week, I wrote about homophones, those pesky sound-alike words like “booty” and “bootie” that can lead to laughter — or a stern talking-to on a school field trip.

I’m not immune to the odd mishearing. The older I get, and the thicker my ears become, the more often it happens.

Now that I think about it, I’ve been mishearing things for a good long time…

[Cue flashback music; page starts to dissolve in shimmering waves.]

The year is 1984. A much younger — and thinner — version of me is laid out on a sticky vinyl bench in the weight room of St. Albans School for Boys in Washington. The atmosphere is stifling; everything smells like drooping French cheese. I’m getting psyched up to do some bench presses. As I wrap my fingers around the warm steel bar, one of my favorite songs comes over the P.A. system.

“Hey, awesome!” I say. “Earth, Wind, and Fi-yah!”

My spotter raises a skeptical eyebrow.

Soon the weight room is vibrating to a funkalicious beat. I’m ready and waiting when it comes time for the chorus. “Breakfast food!” I sing, “I like a cruise, it’s all right; breakfast food, let’s read the news…”

Huh?

The lyrics never made much sense to me, either, but I liked the song, which kept my arms pumping long after they went all rubbery.

It was only twenty-five years later, when I heard the song in the car and remembered to look up the lyrics on the internet when I got home, that I realized just how wrong I’d been.

Earth, Wind, & Fire hadn’t written a song about breakfast food. It was a call to the dance floor: “Let us groove!”

Neither was it an ode to luxury travel. What I’d heard as, “I like a cruise,” was actually, “Light up your fuse.”

I thought of all the times I’d belted out the song in the weight room. Embarrassing! No wonder the lacrosse team had looked so amused.

And then, last week, as I was researching the linguistic difference between “booty” and “bootie,” I learned that I wasn’t alone in my embarrassment. People mishear song lyrics all the time. They hear, “The girl with colitis goes by,” instead of “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes;” and “’scuse me while I kiss this guy,” instead of “…’scuse me while I kiss the sky.”

There’s even a name for these lyrical misinterpretations: “mondegreens.” The name itself is a mondegreen, a mishearing of a phrase from a 17th century ballad. The original phrase was “And laid him on the green,” but was misheard by the writer Sylvia Wright as, “And Lady Mondegreen.”

Perhaps you have your own example of a homegrown mondegreen. I’d love to hear about it, if you do. It doesn’t have to come from a song. Any creative mishearing will do — especially if it’s funny. Or poignant. Or both. One of my favorites comes from my mother-in-law, whose native tongue is Portuguese, and who dutifully repeated, on her wedding day, the phrase, “…in sickness and in Hell…”

What I love about mondegreens, and malapropisms in general, is how they reveal the mind’s relentless quest to find meaning in noise. Here’s an example from the world of letters. See if you can decipher the following sentence:

Yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn “x.”

Replacing all the vowels with an “x” doesn’t prevent most of us from being able to read the sentence. Modern Hebrew speakers manage just fine without written vowels!

Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, likes to use this x’ed-out sentence as an example of how good the human brain is at filling in the blanks, and as an illustration of “redundancy,” or the extra information that is packed into language, partially to help compensate for the ambiguity of sounds.

But sometimes the ambiguity is so strong, and the mishearings so frequent, that the language itself undergoes a change. You might not know it, but that piece of fabric you tie around your neck in the kitchen used to be called a “napron.” But the sounds in “a napron” were so often run together that now we call it “an apron.”

Same thing with the creepy-crawly that used to be called “an ewt,” but has morphed into “a newt.”

There’s something beautifully self-correcting about a language — provided it doesn’t have a governing body full of pedants dictating what can and can’t be said, and in what way. (I’m talking to you, France!)

There’s humor and pathos in our feeble attempts to comprehend the world.

Here’s to all the fruitful mistakes!

Especially the embarrassing ones.