Eagles

An amuse bouche before this week’s entrée.  The Revenant, staring Leo DiCaprio and nominated for 12 Oscars™, is a noun meaning a person who has returned after death or a long absence. It derives from the French word revenir, to return. 

Earlier this week Glenn Frey --  one of the founders of the Eagles* -- passed away. One of the band’s biggest hits was Hotel California, which opens with the line “On a dark desert highway, cool breeze in my hair, warm smell of colitas rising up through the air.” The word colitas derives from the Spanish word cola meaning tail and the suffix  -ita signifies a small tail.  According to Urban Dictionary, colitas is a slang term for marijuana (I tend to believe Urban Dictionary on this one). 

Another line from that song from that song is “relax said the night man, we are programmed to receive.” Listeners regularly mishear the word receive as deceive and misinterpret night as knight. The band has never disclosed the meaning of the song’s full scope. In the excellent documentary “History of the Eagles” Glenn Frey explained that some songs are only for the artist to know the true meaning.  He did, however, disclose that the line, “they stab with their steely knives but they just can’t kill the beast” was a reference to one of the band members dating an ex-girlfriend of someone from Steely Dan.

Mondegreen

noun

1. a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics of a song.

Circa 1950s: from Lady Mondegreen, a misinterpretation of the phrase laid him on the green, from the traditional ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray.”

*The name of the band is Eagles, not The Eagles, which is why I didn’t capitalize the word the before Eagles. I think “founder of Eagles” reads oddly.