Butchering Song Lyrics

Ask any of my closest friends and they'll tell you I am easily amused by purposely butchering song lyrics--particularly those songs that were the soundtrack of our adolescence in the 1980s. Ask Beth about the Cyndi Lauper song "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" where she surely sings "They test the water" instead of "They just wanna." Or ask Christine how I tainted the lyrics to The Clash's "Rock the Casbah."

So I have a special chuckle for the journalist Silvana Paternostro, whose book My Colombian War I'm feverishly copyediting (for the second time). In it she describes how hip she thought she was wearing her bell-bottoms purchased in Miami and able to sing American pop songs like "Kung Fu Fighting" and "Get Down Tonight." She writes:

We lip-synched to "Do the Hustle," belting out "chew the hot dog" with complete confidence.

I love finding kindred spirits.