In 1978, when I was 16, I bought Bruce Springsteen's "Darkness on the Edge of Town" LP. At the end of Side 1 was the famous ballad "Racing in the Street," featuring a lyric that I found rather interesting:

"Some guys they just give up living
And start dying little by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up
And go racin' in the street"

"Some guys come home from work and wash up". I thought well, at least that's considerate of them. They do the washing up before they go out. A nice bit of gender equality there. Everyone appreciates it when their partner does the dishes. It's never much fun to have lots of dirty pots and pans lying around. Washing up is an important household chore.

It wasn't until decades later that I found out that that's not actually what "wash up" means here. In American English, as I'm sure we all know now, to 'wash up' means to have a wash, to perform one's ablutions, to wash one's body - or at least part of it. I felt rather foolish for having misunderstood Bruce for all those years.

So my question to the Massive is this: Have you ever misunderstood a lyric because of a difference between two geographical varieties of English?