this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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We went with "he's got his trampoline". We were pretty sure it couldn't actually be that, but there were no other suggestions.
Pre-internet, unless you owned the record, and they'd printed the lyrics on the sleeve, you pretty much had to guess. It's quite funny looking at the lyrics for 80s/90s tracks now, and finding out what they were actually saying, vs what we thought they were as kids/teens.
A particularly amusing one to look back on was Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell.
It actually says "They paved paradise, put up a parking lot".
By now, we all know American language well enough to know "parking lot" is the American phrase for "car park", but at the time, none of us had ever heard it. A "lot" only meant "many".
What we had heard of, was a "park and ride", a new scheme where car users could park on the outskirts of town and get a shuttle bus into the centre.
We also slightly misheard the first bit, so our two options were:
"If it ain't paradise, put up a park and ride"
Or
"If it ain't paradise, put up a park and laugh".