"Wrapped up like a dude, another owner in the night..."
"Excuse me while I kiss this guy..."
And of course, "in a gadda da vida baby" (ok, so that's really the lyric).
Once a songwriter pens a lyric and it's belted out by some lead singer it's a bit like a game of telephone... One listener hears the words one way, another listener hears an entirely different line. And sometimes, the lyrics you think you hear are even better than the original. Paul Farhi had a fun piece in The Washington Post on Sunday talking about this. And apparently there's a name for all this mis-hearing:

The apparent name for this phenomenon is mondegreens, a word coined by writer Sylvia Wright in the 1950s to describe her childhood misreading of an old Scottish folk song that referred, or so she thought, to "Lady Mondegreen." Instead, the song described the slaying of a noble and the townspeople who "laid him on the green."

The all-time greatest mondegreen may be "Louie, Louie." The song has been recorded by hundreds of artists, but I refer here to the 1963 hit by the Kingsmen. When the song came out, some parents thought lead singer Jack Ely's slurring of the lyrics masked indecent or obscene statements. The resultant uproar led to a federal investigation. "Louie" is actually a sweet story of a homesick sailor who longs to return to his girlfriend ("A fine girl, she wait for me/Me catch the ship across the sea . . . ").

And in the end, Farhi comes to the conclusion that being correct isn't nearly as fulfilling as being creative:

I mean, finding the real lyrics now would be like finding that some other long-cherished artifice of memory wasn't strictly true, as if your dad wasn't really that strong or your first girlfriend, really, wasn't all that pretty. All this may be literally true. But that's the problem with the literal truth: It has very little poetry. And it sure as heck ain't got no soul.

Now come on, we've all done it... What's the best totally wrong lyric you've ever belted out? And how did you finally discover that you got it wrong?