To my great amusement, last Sunday’s post inspired a text from a regular reader only a few hours after it went up, requesting I suggest a few remedies for Christians suffering from reduced attention spans, which I suspect is almost every Christian in the Western world and more than a few outside it.
He’s a good friend, but he fell right into my trap, which was very much deliberate. I wanted our readers to stop and think.
“If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.”
Musician and producer Rick Beato demonstrated the truth of Solomon’s words in a recent video. He tracked the viewing time of critics of his theories about human creativity. On average, these viewers consumed only 3:47 of a video over nine minutes long before stopping to pound out their (often very well expressed) objections to what Rick was saying.
The problem? They hadn’t heard the last two-thirds of his case.
Have you ever heard of a mondegreen?
That’s the technical word they give it when you listen to something, but you hear something different.
Apparently, people do it all the time when they’re listening to song lyrics, for example. There is some phrase that is sung, but their ear picks up something different, often with irrational results.
Want to see if you’ve ever mondegreened? Okay, if you have even a passing familiarity with popular music, you might be able to guess what famous songs produced the following mondegreens. (I’m guessing most of us are in middle age somewhere, so I’ll keep the examples a bit retro.)