How I Learned to Stop Grooving on Sunday Afternoons

One of the monumental challenges of my childhood was the problem of my given name.

Back in 1880, my great-grandfather decided that the family tradition of recycling the same names was silly. He wanted to bring in a new name for his first-born son, and since he ran a country store, he ran into a lot of people, including his favorite shoe salesman, Leslie Black. At the time, “Leslie” was a perfectly acceptable male name, clocking in at #109 in popularity and not even charting on the female name list. But then my grandfather named his son Leslie and my father had named me Leslie (hey, what happened to the new name thing?). By the time I came along, the male name had fallen off the charts (that has continued; it now ranks #3083 among male names), while the female version had gone from nonexistent to almost faddish, peaking around #60 in popularity. So when I arrived at first grade, I had a – wait for it – GIRL’S NAME!

This was a problem for a 5-year-old boy, and my classmates knew it. I argued my case, of course. “What about Leslie Howard?” I asked the jerk-faces (or where they dummy-butts?). “Who’s that?” they replied. “You know, the guy in Gone With The Wind? The kinda wimpy co-star?” “Never heard of him.” And that was really my only male Leslie use case. Leslie Nielsen’s moment of fame in Airplane! was still a decade away. Leslie Odom Jr. wasn’t even born yet.

By age 6 it got even worse. On the first day of second grade, a new student arrived. An actual girl named Leslie. Recess was hell.

But then… a song came along that redeemed everything. “Groovin’’” by The Young Rascals became a #1 hit single. And, like a beautifully- wrapped gift, it included this lyric: “You and me and Leslie -- groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon.”

I felt seen by the Young Rascals…

Never mind that I didn’t know at the time what “groovin’” referred to, or what a threesome might be. That lyric became a weapon to me — just the ammo I needed to fight the slings and arrows of elementary school name-taunting. When needed, I could summon it defiantly: “Oh yeah, poopy-pants? There’s a SONG with my name in it!”

It wasn’t till I started courting my wife decades later that the carefully-constructed lyric world I had built came crashing down. She listened to me sing “Groovin’” at the top of my lungs, with special emphasis on the relevant lyric. Then she quietly said, “Endlessly.” “Hunh?” “It’s you and me -- ENDLESSLY groovin’.”

Marriage is many things. But one of its few deep disappointments has been the revisions it has forced on some of my favorite song lyrics. The first few years brought a series of shocking revelations.

For years I’d been singing “I’ll be home, styrofoam, waiting for you” to the song “Build Me Up Buttercup.”

“Beside the phone,” she said, shaking her head. “He is ‘beside the phone waiting’ for her. “How do you know that? He could be crying into a piece of Styrofoam waiting for her.” “Uh. Yeah. No.”

My re-education continued. Turns out Bob Dylan didn’t sing “The ants are my friends; they’re blowing in the wind,” he said “the answer.” The Monkee’s did not sing, “Then I saw her face; now I’m gonna leave her.” It was “now I’m a believer.” Creedence Clearwater Revival never asserted “There is a bathroom on the right.” They thought it was a “bad moon on the rise.”

In my defense, I’m not alone. Over the years, I’ve collected mistakes other people have made too. My bride was certain that the song by Queen was titled “Another One Bites the Doctor.” Another friend thought that Bryan Adams got “his first real sex dream” in the Summer of ’69 --  not “his first real six string.” Phoebe on “Friends” was shocked to find out that Elton John had asked a “Tiny Dancer” to hold him close, not “Tony Danza.” At some point I actually bought a book that collected famously misheard song lyrics. Its title was “Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy,” a tribute to Jimi Hendrix’s line from “Purple Haze” – “Scuse me while I kiss the sky.”

This book debunks more than two hundred promising, but incorrect, song lyrics. 

As I have been thinking this week about how so many of us could get so many lyrics so wrong, it seems like it’s not that different from how we lock in a lot of our beliefs.

·      Somebody says (or sings) something catchy and we like it. Outside of the music world, maybe it’s a meme or a great soundbite or a worldview. Then we use our “anchoring bias” to lock in the lyric or idea.

·      We construct a world in which the new lyric or idea makes sense. We hear things that may start out sounding illogical, but if we repeat them enough, even the most outrageous conspiracy theories make sense – maybe biting doctors (or eating cats) really is a thing.

·      We start singing the song lyric or repeating the misinformation louder and louder – hearing what we want to hear, not really even listening anymore. Call this “confirmation bias.”

·      We screen out other people saying (or singing) something different. In the real world, algorithms do this for us.

·      When the lyric (or idea) we believed turns out to be wrong, we are discombobulated. It was kinda cool to think Bob Dylan considered ants friends and that they were vulnerable to wind gusts -- the real lyrics are even more challenging.

As painful as it has been for me, I’ve mostly accepted the arrival of new lyrics in my life. Through a combination of paying attention to trusted friends, doing my own research on the Internet, and listening carefully to the actual songs, I’ve come to – grudgingly -- accept a new world of ideas. I’ve been able to accept that The Clash was rocking “the casbah,” not the “cash bar.” I’ve given up on The Eurythmics’ world where sweet dreams were “made of cheese” instead of “these.” I’ve understood that Lil Nas X wasn’t taking his horse to a ”hotel room” but to “the old town road.” And I’ve even come to appreciate that, as proud as I was that Leslie might be included in The Young Rascals’ threesome, two people endlessly “groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon” is probably enough.

You don't have to groove on Sunday afternoons; you can also watch football.

Now I’ve just got to figure out how to be as open-minded about my other beliefs.

Notes:

The Social Security Administration’s website has a page that enables you to search name popularity by decade: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1880s.html

The inglorious fall of male ‘Leslie’s’: https://www.thebump.com/b/leslie-baby-name

Phoebe and Tony Danza: https://youtu.be/4o2u2RjEFHo?si=a-FsqMGi9S8Qf9Qz

Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: https://www.amazon.com/Scuse-While-Kiss-This-Guy/dp/0671501283

Different kinds of bias: https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/psychology/social-psychology/bias/