Why don't you have a list of misheard Pet Shop Boys lyrics?

It seems an awful lot of people get a kick out of descriptions of misheard song lyrics. And I have to admit that some of them can be a real hoot. For instance, I'm aware of a Korean bootleg of Please that includes an attempted transcription of the lyrics. The famed "West End Girls" line "From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station" is mistakenly rendered as "From Lake Geneva to the filling station." Misheard lyrics don't come much better than that.

But that being said, I find myself highly skeptical of a great many reported misheard song lyrics (and not just of PSB songs). While undoubtedly some are utterly genuine mistakes, I'm absolutely convinced that more than a few are "fakes," intentionally made up for comic effect.

So I've decided against offering a list of allegedly misheard PSB lyrics for three reasons:

  1. I have no way of distinguishing genuine mistakes from fakes,
  2. Inventories of misheard lyrics are the junk food of pop-music discourse, and
  3. It would by its very nature be a completely open-ended list, with no potential end in sight.

While I do indeed already have several open-ended lists in my Lists section, I sometimes find myself regretting I ever started them. So I'm certainly disinclined to start another, the entries for which would surely proliferate like flies on rotting hamburger—which, considering the nature of such a list, is by no means an inappropriate simile.