Sorry, can you repeat that?

This afternoon while listening to Vaughan Williams' "Five Tudor Portraits" and, initially, to the first portrait of the drunken female brewer, Elinor Rumming, I was stunned to hear VW apparently compare her slatternliness to "like Michael Tippett".  Hastily hunting for my copy of the text I found that VW had actually written, "Lo, here is an old tippet", referring apparently to a type of cloak worn in the tudor period; and had not, in fact, taken to slandering his younger colleague.

I wonder whether other posters have experienced similar instances of momentary confusion over their comprehension of the texts that composers have set.