So what is the true meaning of “fanute”? Most likely in an effort to save syllables, or out of pure laziness, French Montana omitted most of the hard consonants from the words “from the hoopty coupe to that Ghost, dog” leading to the mondegreen “fanute the coupe to that Ghost, dog.” Fanute is not unlike Larson’s cow’s “saw”: “fanute” is a figment of the viewer/listener’s imagination, and because of the way the sentence is structured, “fanute” appears to be a transitive verb, thus sending the listener on a potentially vexing quest for meaning where there is none to be found. A music blogger who goes by Mobb Deen, who has a bit of an obsession with this particular mondegreen, has since defined “fanute” as: 1. v., To convert; to turn less into more via “swag.” Or 2. Anything you want it to mean.

Not everyone is satisfied with this chaos, however, and one site in particular, RapGenius, has harnessed the power of the masses to guarantee that you never embarrass yourself at a party with a rap mondegreen again. It’s a wiki-style site that posts song lyrics and invites users to offer explanations for potentially obscure references or difficult-to-understand phrasings. At RapGenius, you’ll find Montana’s lyrics transcribed properly, and you’ll also find an explanation in a pop-up window: “ ‘Ghost, dog’ refers to the extremely expensive Rolls-Royce Ghost, which Montana now claims to be driving in place of his old, beat-up car.” It is even accompanied by an image of the Rolls-Royce. This read of Montana’s lyrics — most likely 100 percent correct (and fanutelessly dry) — was added by the user SameOldShawn, whose “Rap IQ” on the site has surpassed 100,000 points. RapGenius ranks its users, and at 10 points per “good” explanation and 20 points per “great,” you can safely assume that SameOldShawn keeps busy supporting RapGenius’s efforts.

The perhaps fallacious assumption at the Web site’s heart is that every rap lyric has a meaning and that the meaning of every rap lyric should be unearthed. It’s true that rap is routinely made up of arcane local vernacular, references to pop culture, snippets of other rap lyrics and even music-industry, inside-baseball jargon. Yet part of the joy of listening to a lot of rap music is having all this unfold for you as you become more familiar with it. And furthermore, you need look no further than the work of Das EFX, Cam’ron or Ghostface Killah to find that between the playful nature of the genre and its formal strictures, plenty of rap lyrics have absolutely no meaning at all. Cam’ron claims, in the opening line to “Get Em Girls,” that he can “get computers ’putin’ ” What can we possibly do with that?

Victor Vazquez from the Brooklyn rap duo Das Racist once referred to RapGenius as “white-devil sophistry” on a song called “Middle of the Cake.” And yes, that lyric, too, is dissected on RapGenius — pull it up, and you’ll find a freestyle rap on video from an editor of the site, shirtlessly and awkwardly refuting the claim. If the RapGeniuses are sophists — like the sneaky Greek philosophers who perniciously used logic to lead followers to illogical conclusions — then their wrongheaded conclusion is perhaps that all of this can, or should, be explained in a linear, X-means-Y fashion. Which means that in this online world of prescriptive listening, there is no room for fanute.

RapGenius is part of a broader effort in recent years, both online and in print, to organize rap lyrics into something more useful to listeners, as if rap lyrics qua rap lyrics were utterly useless. In 2010, Yale University Press published the Anthology of Rap, which canonizes dozens of rap songs — or more specifically, their lyrics — as a sort of poetry. Not only does the anthology include verses “that were almost certainly not written by the performer credited — ghostwriting has been and always will be part of the genre — it warrants mentioning that the anthology contains more than a few transcription errors of its own, chronicled by Paul Devlin in Slate. For example, Devlin points out that the transcription of 50 Cent’s lyrics from “Ghetto Qua’ran” would have it that George Wallace, the segregationist four-time Alabama governor, was dealing cocaine in Jamaica, Queens — instead of Gerald Wallace, the drug dealer 50 Cent actually references. (Alas, no RapGeniuses were present to correct them.)