On a tangential note I’ve been looking for a linguistic term for the times when you don’t see a mistake because you just assume a word is what you expect it to say (e.g. not spotting that the ‘r’ was missing in the ‘Theatre Severn’ gig heading, despite it being up there for months.

I’m particularly prone to this myself when reading the lyrics on here (and of course in proof-reading my own comments). I reckon this has now happened at least a dozen times that someone points out something in a lyric that I thought was written there all along. And in some of my favourites and all.

Anyway the best term I can come up with in the psycholinguistics of the reading skill is ‘false recognition.’

Any proof-readers out there? Do they have a different term for this I wonder ?

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…I’d always heard it is “dogger”. ie well, I don’t need to explain it – I’m sure you’re all world wise chaps.

Also “Euphemisms, Audrey, euphemisms” I hear as “Euphemisms all for euphemisms”.

And (takes deep breath) isn’t it “Euphemisms, AuBrey, euphemisms”? Possibly some reference to Aubrey Aubergine in crap 80s animated kids’ show The Munch Bunch?

But before we went our separate ways, and remembering my one-man campaign throughout ’06 to get this song on the set-list, NB57 was kind enough to show me an early hand-written version, in which aubergines, rather than asparagus, took the title role.

Lucky, really. A shower of aubergines could have done serious damage, that fateful night in Holmfirth.

As when someone requested it recently in Cambridge, Nigel also explained the reason they’ve never played it onstage is that this is a Neil Crossley tune that he (Nigel) can’t do justice to in a live environment.