mondegreens

Date: 23 Jun 2003 20:08:39 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.music.paul-simon
Size: 5,014 bytes

probably a little more than you wanted to know about this subject
MIND THE GREENS!
Creative mishearings of lyrics
Some years ago, the British newspaper the Guardian briefly ran a series in its
Weekend supplement on Saturdays called “Come Again”, recounting the strange
misunderstandings which occur when we don’t quite catch the words of a song
lyric, a station announcement or other indistinct bit of language. That
wonderful pattern-matching ability I’ve mentioned elsewhere comes into being
and forces us to turn garble into sense, any sense, even if it’s nonsense.
I first came across the canonical example of such misunderstandings at
university many years ago, when a friend showed me her teddy-bear. Old and
faded, with one ear gone and his fur worn down to the nap, he was past his best
but obviously still a cherished object. “I call him Gladly,” she said.
Seeing my blank look, she explained patiently, “You know, as in ‘Gladly,
the cross-eyed bear’.” It took a few moments for the penny to drop. In the
years since, I’ve come across a couple of others—the story about the small
child saying his prayers: “Our Father, which art in Heaven. Harold be thy
name” and a creative version of a once-popular Beatles song, “The girl with
colitis goes by”. And I was recently reminded of a popular song current in my
youth (the early fifties) entitled Shrimp Boats, which had the line “The
shrimp boats are a-coming”. The next line, I have only just discovered, was
“Their sails are in sight” but my juvenile concentration on the basics of
life rendered it as “They’ll be frying tonight”, and this is the version
that has stayed with me for more than forty years.
It was only a little while ago, when a query came into the Usenet group
alt.usage.english, that I discovered not only that these felicitous mishearings
are sought out and treasured by lots of people, but that they have a name:
mondegreens. As an avid collector of words, this set me off on a trail that
seems to be unending. I discovered that the name was coined by Sylvia Wright,
in an article called “The Death of Lady Mondegreen”, in Harper’s Magazine
in 1954. It appears she had as a child misheard the last line of a famous old
Scottish ballad called The Bonny Earl o’ Murray (sometimes spelled Moray) and
thought it went: Ye Hielands and ye Lowlands, O where hae ye been? Thay hae slain the Earl o’ Murray, And Lady Mondegreen.
“How romantic to have them both die together,” she thought, and was
bitterly disappointed when the last line turned out to be the much more
prosaic: “And hae laid him on the green”. However, she turned her
disappointment to our benefit by changing her elegant-sounding mistake into a
truly aristocratic name for the whole class of aural misinterpretations. It
hasn’t made many dictionaries yet, but the columnist Jon Carroll is waging a
single-handed battle through his articles in the San Francisco Chronicle to get
the name more widely recognised. To judge by the number of Web pages devoted to
mondegreeens, so described, he’s winning.
Here are a few examples from the column in The Guardian: * Elvis Presley: “I’m in love, uh, a’ Marsha Cook” (Mike Levon) * A dismal-sounding Irish travel firm: “Grey Day Holidays” (heard on
radio there by Bob Neish from Boston, who was quite relieved to discover the
firm was really “Grade A Holidays”). * Boney M seemed to be singing “How can you sing the Lord’s song in
Australia?”, rather than “... in a strange land”. (Archie Moore). * Caught in passing, the end of a piece on a BBC radio discussion
programme: “Masturbate immediately!” (Simon Cuff avidly waited for the
repeat but discovered that all the MP Harriet Harman had actually said was:
“This is an issue the Labour Party must debate immediately.”). * Joey Ramone’s “Things were looking grim but they’re looking good
again” got turned into “Been to Luton Green with the Luton girl again” by
Graham Larkbey.
Many people would argue that most of the mishearings in the Guardian column are
not in fact mondegreens. They limit that word to an accidental mishearing of
the words of a song. By that definition, this one, for which I am indebted to
Markus Laker, is not a mondegreen either: a deliberate mishearing in a Maxell
TV commercial of the last line of Desmond Decker’s The Israelite “Oh oh, me
ears are alight”, the correct words being “Oh oh, the Israelite”.
If you’d like to explore further, here are some places to look: * Jon Carroll’s column Mondegreen Sorbet. * See the book by Gavin Edwards, entitled “ ’Scuse Me While I Kiss This
Guy, and other Misheard Lyrics”, published by Fireside in 1995. * William Safire discusses mondegreens in his book “On Language”,
published by Times Books in 1980 (ISBN 0 8129 0937 2).
Happy mondegreening ...
World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2003.