Mondegreen

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A mondegreen (also sometimes spelled "mondagreen") is the mishearing (usually accidental) of a phrase in such a way that it acquires a new meaning.

The word "mondegreen" is itself a mondegreen. The American writer Sylvia Wright coined it in an essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen", which was published in Harper's Magazine in Nov. 1954.[1] She wrote:

When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques. One of my favorite poems began, as I remember:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray, [sic]
And Lady Mondegreen.

The actual line is "And laid him on the green", from the anonymous 17th century ballad "The Bonnie Earl O' Murray". Wright gives other examples of what she says, "I shall hereafter call mondegreens," such as:

  • Surely/Shirley, Good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life ("Surely goodness and mercy…" from Psalm 23)
  • the "wild, strange battle cry Haffely, Gaffely, Gaffely, Gonward." ("Half a league, half a league,/ Half a league onward," from "The Charge of the Light Brigade")

The columnist Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle has long been a popularizer of the term and a collector of mondegreens. He may have been the chief link between Wright's work and the general popularity of the notion today.

While mondegreens are a common occurrence for children, many adults have their own collection, particularly with regard to popular music.

Contents

[edit] Origins and occurrence in popular culture

Quite a few mondegreens may be seen in closed-captioned live television broadcasting of impromptu speeches, interviews, etc. (one local news report of a "grand parade" was captioned as a "Grandpa raid").[citation needed] The prevalence of mondegreens in this context arises in part from the use of speech recognition software and the need for captions to keep up with the fast pace of programs. Typically, the software uses pre-programmed information that matches sounds to written forms, then suggests captions from which a human "captionist" chooses. Mistakes may come from inadequacies in the program's recognition capability, from the failure to provide the software with vocabulary specific to the context, from the captionist's own mishearing of the words, or from the need for the captionist to make a decision before an ambiguous statement is made clear by what is said next.

Some mondegreens arise from false friends. A phrase in one language may be misheard as a semi-sensical phrase in another language. The humorous aspect of these has given rise to a music video genre known as animutation, in which music in a different language (typically Japanese) is "misheard" into English, and illustrated. Engrish mondegreens can occur when English lyrics are reproduced by singers of Asian languages. See Soramimi.

This may happen in the opposite direction as well: i.e., English words of a song are misheard, intentionally or not, to mean something else in a native language, often with a humorous effect. An example is a Russian joke in which the song "Can't Buy Me Love" was announced as "кинь бабе лом" (IPA: [kinʲ babʲɛ lom]), which roughly translates as "Throw a crowbar to the old woman".

The Israeli pop-rock band "Tislam" has a famous line in one of their greatest hits, "Tnu Li Rockn'Roll" (Give me Rock 'n' Roll), that says "Hoshavt oti bacheder etmol ad meuchar, lishmo'a Indonezi shel Anshei Hakfar" (You sat me down in the room till late yesterday evening, to hear "Indonezi" by the Village People). The songwriter, Yair Nitzani, was a DJ at a club where people kept asking him to put on the song "Indonezi" (meaning "Indonesian"), because they misheard the real name of the song, "In the Navy". The popular Israeli website Avatiach is a forum devoted to mondegreens in Israeli songs, so called because of the common mishearing of "avatiach" (watermelon) in place of "ahavtiah"(I loved her) in a well-known song.

Children in the United States are often surprised the first time they actually read the lyrics to the national anthem, the Pledge of Allegiance, or the tune America, texts they have been reciting uncomprehendingly for years.

  • The Star-Spangled Banner produces several examples of mondegreens. Comedian Bill Dana (as the Hispanic character José Jiminez) used the old joke of the entire stadium singing directly to him before a ballgame: "José, can you see?". And in Beverly Cleary's children's novel Ramona the Pest, Ramona refers to the "dawnzer lee light" (dawn's early light).
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I pledge ally gents (allegiance) to the flag
Of the United stars (States) of America
And to the free public (republic)
For witches stand/Richard Stands/Richard Stanz/witched stands (for which it stands)
One nation, under God, invisible (indivisible)
With liber tea and justice for all/lizardy justin to malls (with liberty and justice for all).
or in an extreme example,
I pledge a lesion, to the flag of the United Stakes of America
And to the republic, for Richard Stanz
One nation, undergone, in the visible
with little tea, and just ice, for all
  • The tune "America" has been misinterpreted as:
My country tisofthy (assumed to be a name...like Timothy)
Sweet land of liberty of thee icing
Land where my father died
Land of the children's (pilgrim's) pride
From every mountainside
Like fritos ring (let freedom ring)

A popular joke has a child being asked what God's first name is, and he replies, "Andy." He gets this name from the hymn "In the Garden" (also known as "I Come To The Garden Alone"): "Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me, Andy tells me I am his own..." as opposed to, "And He walks with me..."

The LDS (Mormon) hymn "As I Have Loved You" (which borrows from John 13:34-35), the lyrics are popularly misinterpreted by children as "As I have loved you, love one another...By this shameno (shall men know), ye are mighty siples (my disciples)." LDS children often wonder what a "shameno" is, and how they can become "mighty siples".

"Mondegreen" is also a segment on the popular Australian music quiz show Spicks and Specks (ABC TV).

The board game Mad Gab features 1,200 mondegreens used as puzzles for players to solve.

Many mondegreens have given ideas for song parodies. Some artists, such as John Fogerty and Jimi Hendrix, have deliberately sung their songs as mondegreens in concerts, such as "There's a bathroom on the right" in "Bad Moon Rising" instead of the correct "There's a bad moon on the rise", or "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" in lieu of "kiss the sky", to amuse the audience.

Mairzy Doats, a 1943 novelty song by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman and Jerry Livingston, works the other way around. The lyrics are already a mondegreen, and it's up to the listener to figure out what they mean. The refrain of the song repeats nonsensical sounding lines:

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?

The only clue to the actual meaning of the words is contained in the bridge:

If the words sound queer and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey,
Sing "Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy."

From this point, the ear can figure out that the last line of the refrain is "A kid will eat ivy too, wouldn't you?", but this last line is only sung in the song as a mondegreen.

The term was the inspiration for the name of the US-British a capella vocal group Lady Mondegreen.

[edit] Examples

  • The "top 3" mondegreens according to Jon Carroll are:[2]
    • No. 1: Gladly the cross-eyed bear[1] (from the line in the hymn "Keep Thou My Way" by Fanny Crosby, "Kept by Thy tender care, gladly the cross I'll bear")[3] Carroll and many others quote it as "Gladly the cross I'd bear. Ed McBain used the mondegreen as the title of a novel.)
    • No. 2: There's a bathroom on the right (the line at the end of each verse of "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival — "There's a bad moon on the rise")[4]
    • No. 3: 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy (from a lyric in the song "Purple Haze", by Jimi Hendrix - "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky").
  • The girl with colitis goes by (from a lyric in the song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", by The Beatles - "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes").[2]
  • You and me and Leslie (from a lyric in the song "Groovin'", by The Young Rascals - "You and me endlessly").
  • Sixty-five roses is a common mishearing of the disease cystic fibrosis; this mishearing is intentionally used by people and organizations fighting this disease.[5]
  • A wean in a manger ("Away in a Manger" using the Scottish word for a baby). Gervase Phinn used "A Wayne in a Manger" as the title of a book about a children's nativity play.
  • Away in a manger, no crisps for his friends ("Away in a manger, no crib for his bed") Robert Rankin recalls mishearing the lyrics to this Christmas carol at the age of five in his novel They Came And Ate Us.
  • Can a mother's tender care/ Cease towards the child she-bear? (instead of "she bare", archaic for "she bore"): cited in G. K. Chesterton The Everlasting Man, chapter 1; later used in Bob Marley's lyrics for "Johnny Was".
  • José can you see? (Mistaking "O say can you see" taken from the Star-Spangled Banner for a common Hispanic name) Bill Dana famously used this in a comedy bit as the Hispanic character Jose Jiminez.[6]
  • It's hard to wreck a nice beach (This originates in a story, perhaps apocryphal, about one of the earliest speech recognition programs being presented, at a demo, with someone saying "It's hard to recognize speech" and producing that phrase as the output. Regardless of the truth of the story, this mondegreen was used on a t-shirt given to Apple engineers who worked on the company's early speech-recognition software.[citation needed] ). A longer version is This nudist play can wreck a nice beach (from "This new display can recognize speech").
  • ... Harold (or Howard) be thy name... (from the Lord's Prayer - "... hallowed be thy name ...")[1]
  • ... blessed art thou, a monk swimming ... (from the Hail Mary phrase "... blessed art thou amongst women ...". A Monk Swimming is also the title of a Malachy McCourt memoir.)
  • Olive, the other reindeer ...' (from the song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'": "All of the other reindeer ...") This mondegreen has become the title of a children's book, which was later made into an animated holiday program featuring the voice of Drew Barrymore.
  • Barney's the king of Israel... (This mondegreen was featured on the comic One Big Happy, and comes from a refrain in "The First Noel": "Born is the king of Israel".)
  • Tell the Huns it's time for me (from the song "Beneath the Lights of Home (In a Little Sleepy Town)" sung by Deanna Durbin in Nice Girl? (1941) — "Turn the hands of time for me") on the BBC radio programme Quote Unquote in 2002.
  • Round John Virgin ("Round yon virgin mother and child", from "Silent Night")[1]
  • Sleeping for bread, sir, sold out to every monk and beef-head. Oh oh, me ears are alight. Why find my kids? They buck up and a-leave me. Darling cheese head, I was yards too greasy ("Slaving for bread sir, So that every mouth can be fed. Poor me, the Israelite. Wife and my kids they packed up and leave me. Darling she said I'm yours to receive" from Desmond Dekker's "Israelites". This mondegreen was used in a 1990 television commercial for Maxell audio cassettes.)
  • They all laughed at angry young men ("They all laughed at A. Graham Bell"—a case where the mondegreen appears in a recording: Joni Mitchell sings it in her cover of the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross song "Twisted")[7]
  • Caroline, No (When Brian Wilson reminisced to Tony Asher about a crush he'd had in high school on a cheerleader named Carol Mountain, Asher's response was with the lyric "Oh, Carol, I know." Wilson misheard it as "Caroline, no" and it was decided that that was a far more interesting line for the soon-famous song.)
  • In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by the 1960s acid-rock band Iron Butterfly is an interesting example of a band creating a mondegreen of their own song. The line in the song, as originally conceived, was "In the Garden of Eden...", but became distorted during recording sessions. The exact source of the distortion, either by singer Doug Ingle or drummer Ron Bushy, is unclear, and depends on when and by whom the story is told.
  • Elephants, yeah! ("...e di pensier") at the end of the Duke's aria "La donna è mobile" from Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi
  • Blue Roses (In The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Jim discovers that Laura is the girl he used to call "Blue Roses" because she had pleurosis)
  • The movie Rainman starts from -- and its key epiphanic moment hinges on -- the mis-hearing of "Raymond".
  • In an episode of Friends, Phoebe believes the lyric from Elton John's Tiny Dancer, "Hold me closer, tiny dancer" is actually "Hold me closer, Tony Danza" (the way Phoebe sings the line, it actually sounds as if she's saying "Hold me close, young Tony Danza," which itself is a Mondegreen of a Mondegreen).
  • In "The wedding party" episode of "Fawlty Towers" (BBC, 3 October 1975) Basil Fawlty is flustered by the attractive French Mrs Peignoir. She asks for café au lait. He hears this as café olé, which is coffee with tequila, although neither Basil nor M Peignoir knows that.
  • In Paul Simon's song "All Around The World, Or The Myth Of Fingerprints," "ever since the watermelon" (a line in the middle of the chorus) is often misheard as something having to do with Elvis and a watermelon. The most common interpretations are "Elvis is a watermelon" and "Elvis eats a watermelon."
  • AC/DC's song It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll) is perennially rendered -- courtesy of some very minor celebrities of the Sydney advertising scene -- as "It's a long way to the shop if you want a sausage roll".
  • Numerous school children have wondered about the cremation gone wrong, leading to John Brown's body lying "a-smoulderin' in the grave". The actual lyric is, "John Brown's body lies a-moulderin' in the grave".
  • "I've got shoes; they're made of pythons," is an exaggerated Mondegreen of a lyric from Grease: "I've got chills, they're multiplying," from "You're the One that I Want." It was used as a question on the forementioned game show Spicks and Specks.
  • Secret ASIAN man is a common misinterpretation of Johnny Rivers's Secret Agent Man - so common, in fact, that the Washington, D.C. parody group The Capitol Steps recorded a version using the mis-heard lyrics.[8]
  • Some years ago, a running storyline in the Peanuts comic strip involved Sally participating in a Christmas play. She announced that her one line was "Hark!", after which Harold Angel would sing. Some days into the storyline, a boy named Harold Angel came to the door, asking to rehearse with Sally.

[edit] See also

[edit] Further reading

[edit] Publications

[edit] External links

[edit] References and footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d Sylvia Wright (1957). Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts. McGraw Hill. Contains the essays "The Death of Lady Mondegreen" and "The Quest of Lady Mondegreen".
  2. ^ a b Jon Carroll. "Mondegreens Ripped My Flesh", San Francisco Chronicle.
  3. ^ Frances Crosby. "Keep Thou My Way". The Cyber Hymnal. Retrieved on 2006-09-06.
  4. ^ As a tribute to the fame of this mondegreen, John Fogerty of CCR now frequently sings "there's a bathroom on the right" as the last line of "Bad Moon Rising" in live performances (see the CCR/John Fogerty FAQ). This is captured on his 1998 live album Premonition.
  5. ^ The 65 Roses Story. SixtyFiveRoses.com.
  6. ^ A.Word.A.Day. Wordsmith.org (March 28, 2001).
  7. ^ It is possible she intentionally changed the words, but the original recording was at a fast tempo and the lyrics were not printed on the album jacket; also, "A. Graham Bell" is an uncommon way to refer to the famed inventor and thus is ripe for misinterpetation. It seems much more likely this is a true mondegreen on Mitchell's part.
  8. ^ Capitol Steps artist page. Comedians USA.
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