Mondegreen

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A mondegreen 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 November 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 columnists William Safire of the New York Times and later Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle have long been popularizers of the term and collectors of mondegreens. They may have been the chief links 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. (for example, a local news report of a "grand parade" might be captioned as a "Grandpa raid"). The prevalence of mondegreens in this context arises in part from the use of stenotype machines and the need for captions to keep up with the fast pace of programs. This machine is used not to type out words directly as a common keyboard but rather to record the syllables of the words being spoken. Thus, the stenographic recording is a phonetic transcription of the words being spoken. Software is then used to translate the phonetic syllables into proper words. Given some unusual syllabic constructions, and the sophistication of the software, errors come in as the system tries to distinguish where the word break is in the syllable stream. Typically, the software uses pre-programmed information that matches syllable clusters 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 babʲe 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.

In Manfred Mann's cover of Bruce Springsteen's Blinded by the Light, the line "revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night" is often cited as a prominent example of a mondegreen in popular music. The line is often misinterpreted in Mann's version (the pronunciation is very exaggerated) as "wrapped up like a douche" (Springsteen's original lyric was "cut loose like a deuce"). Deuce, in the song, refers to a 1932 Ford Deuce Coupe, and not a hygienic procedure.

The Star-Spangled Banner produces several examples of mondegreens. Comedian Bill Dana (as the Hispanic character José Jimenez) 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).

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 ..."

In 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.[citation needed]

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, wooden shoe.

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'll eat ivy too; wouldn't you?", but this last line is only sung in the song as a mondegreen.

[edit] Examples

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  • The "top 3" mondegreens according to Jon Carroll are:[2]
  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.) Also, this mondegreen is paraphrased by the band They Might Be Giants in their song "Hide Away Folk Family" (Sadly the cross-eyed bear's been put to sleep behind the stairs, and his shoes are laced with irony.)
  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]
  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]
  • 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.
  • 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. The film Angels In The Outfield makes a reference to this.[5]
  • ... 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.)
  • Sixty-five roses is a common mishearing of the disease cystic fibrosis; this mishearing is intentionally used by people and organizations fighting this disease.[6]
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The movie Rain Man starts from (and its key epiphanic moment hinges on) the mis-hearing of "Raymond".
  • A controversial example is found in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where Donald Duck in a scene chastises Daffy Duck, exclaiming "Goddurn stubborn nitwit". Donald's quacks have frequently been misheard as "God damn stupid nigger", resulting in a hard-to-put-down urban legend.[8]
  • In an episode of the television sitcom 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).
  • "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 (This group may falsely be receiving credit for the song "Secret Asian Man" by the comedy group DaVinci's Notebook).[9]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c 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 September 6, 2006.
  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. ^ A.Word.A.Day. Wordsmith.org (March 28, 2001).
  6. ^ The 65 Roses Story. SixtyFiveRoses.com.
  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. ^ Quacking Wise. Snopes.com (December 30, 1998).
  9. ^ Capitol Steps artist page. Comedians USA.
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