mondegreen revisited

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:38 AM -0400 9/5/00, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>
>By the way, the Dylan "mondegreen" seems pretty unlikely to me: *"The ants
>are, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, the ants are is blowin' in the wind"
>just doesn't parse!

I've more frequently heard this (reputedly) misparsed as
"The ants are my friends/They're blowing in the wind"
but I'm not sure how the next line ("The answer is blowing in the
wind") is then supposed to be understood.  I've always been unable to
hear the initial couplet as anything other than the intended
"The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind", but there's also a
syntactic misparse I've occasionally come up with--
"What is the answer, then?"
"The answer is blowing in the wind"  (Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.)

larry