Mondegreen

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A mondegreen is the misinterpretation of a line or lyric in a song due to homophony.

Contents 1 Etymology 2 Role in culture 3 In popular culture 3.1 Examples in music 3.2 Examples in film 3.3 Other examples 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

[edit] Etymology

The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term mondegreen in an essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," which was published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954.^[1] In the essay, Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the final line from the 17th century ballad "The Bonnie Earl O' Murray." She wrote:

When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and 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 fourth line is "And laid him on the green." As Wright explained the need for a new term, "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original."

Other examples Wright suggested are:

• Surely 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.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Role in culture

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

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.

[edit] In popular culture

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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" (pronounced [kinʲ babʲe lom]), which roughly translates as "Throw a crowbar to the old woman".^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Examples in music

• 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")
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").

Both Creedence's John Fogerty and Hendrix eventually capitalized on these mishearings and deliberately sang the "mondegreen" versions of their songs in concert.^[4][5][6]

• The film "Angels In The Outfield" makes a reference to the mishearing of mistakes "O, say can you see" from The Star-Spangled Banner as "José can you see?".^[7] Bill Dana used this mondegreen in a comedy bit as the Hispanic character José Jimenez. In Beverly Cleary's children's novel Ramona the Pest, Ramona refers to the "Dawnzer lee light" (dawn's early light).

• "Olive, the other reindeer ...", from the song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" misinterprets the line "All of the other reindeer ..." This mondegreen is the title of a children's book about a dog named Olive who stands in for one of Santa's reindeer, which was later made into an animated holiday program featuring the voice of Drew Barrymore.

• The chorus in the 2002 European hit song The Ketchup Song by Las Ketchup is based on the 1979 Sugar Hill Gang song Rapper's Delight. The premise of the Ketchup Song involves a gypsy whose favourite song is Rapper's Delight, but because he doesn't understand the English words he sings a gibberish version of the lyrics using Spanish phonetics.^[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."^[9]

• The line "Try to detect it" from Devo's song "Whip It" is often misheard as "Tattoo Detective."^[10]

• "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes," from the song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by The Beatles, is misheard as "The girl with colitis goes by."^[2]

• "A wean in a manger," using the Scottish word for a baby, instead of "Away in a Manger." Gervase Phinn used "A Wayne in a Manger" as the title of a book about a children's nativity play.^[11]

• In 2007, Cingular aired commercials in which young men are comically clueless about the lyrics of the songs they listen to, hearing The Clash's "Rock the Casbah" as both "lock the cash box" and "stop the cat box", among other mondegreens.^[12]

• 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 by Shlomo Artzi.

• 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 (whose 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 lyrics to the Fall Out Boy song "Sugar, We're Going Down" are notorious for being difficult to discern, particularly the chorus; the actual wording of the chorus is "We're going down, down, in an earlier round/And sugar, we're going down swinging/I'll be your number one with a bullet/A loaded God complex, cock it and pull it", but mondegreens have included "down, down, in a merry-go-round", "number one with the mullet", and "a loaded gun complex". The line preceding the first two repetitions of the chorus, "We're always sleeping in, and sleeping for the wrong team" have been variously misheard as "sleeping for the road tin", "sniffing ink and seeping through the roll tear", "sleepying and we're sleepying the road team", and "say pin in and we're sleeping for the wrong team", amongst other phrases. On YouTube several users have uploaded videos of their misheard lyrics, timed to the song.

• The first line of the Australian National Anthem "Advance Australia Fair" was originally written as "Australia’s Sons let us rejoice, for we are young and free"; the song became popularly known as "The Ostrich Song" after the mondegreen "Australia, Sunset Ostriches for we are young and free".

• "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.^[13]

• 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 (or, if you prefer, "wouldn't chew").

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.

• The Joni Mitchell cover of the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross song "Twisted" includes a mondegreen: the original lyric They all laughed at A. Graham Bell was misheard and subsequently recorded by Mitchell as They all laugh at angry young men.^[14]

• A TV advertisment for Maxell tapes in 1990 used mondegreens for comic effect, based on Desmond Dekker's song 'The Israelites'. The first two verses of the song:

Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,

So that every mouth can be fed.

Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

My wife and my kids, they are packed up and leave me.

Darling, she said, I was yours to be seen.

Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

were represented on a series of handwritten signs as:

Get up in the mornin, 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 cheesehead, I was yards to greasy.

Oh-oh, me ears are alight.

• Some mondegreens make reference to bits of pop culture that didn't surface until many years after the song was originally released. For instance, the 1968 Simon and Garfunkel song "America" contains the line "counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike." Two decades later, when Patrick Stewart's character on the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation became popular, some sang the line "Captain Picard on the New Jersey Turnpike." [2]

• Mike Sutton, a mondegreen director on YouTube with the username "Buffalax", uploaded several non-English music videos which were edited to include subtitles of the written English approximation of the video's original language's sound. These include Internet memes such as Moskau (originally German), Tunak Tunak Tun (originally Punjabi), Indian Thriller (originally Telegu) and Benny Lava (originally Tamil). The latter, involving the video for Prabhu Deva Sundaram's song, "Kalluri Vaanil" from the Indian Tamil movie, Pennin Manathai Thottu, has occasionally been referred to as "the web's hottest clip" ^[15] On the Internet, the term "Buffalaxed" is now synonymous with mondegreens, "words or phrases misheard in ways that yield new meanings."^[16]

• Secret Agent Man, written by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri, can be misheard as "Secret Asian Man." The webcomic Secret Asian Man was named after this mondegreen.

[edit] Examples in film

• The main character in the Australian mockumentary Kenny, mishears the words of the Australian national anthem as "Australians all let us ring Joyce, for she is young and free" ("Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free").

• "Mondegreens" is the name of a segment on the popular Australian music quiz show Spicks and Specks (ABC TV).

[edit] Other examples

• Children often recite the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name" (Hallowed be thy name).

• A speech-recognition project team at Apple Computer in the 1990s created a team T-shirt with the image of a beach and text that read, "Wreck a nice beach" instead of "Recognize speech."

• ... 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.^[17] Similarly, a character in The Glass Menagerie hears the disease named "pleurosis" as "blue roses."
• A controversial example is found in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where Donald Duck in a scene chastises Daffy Duck, exclaiming "Doggone stubborn little..." Donald's quacks have frequently been misheard as "God damn stupid nigger", resulting in a hard-to-put-down urban legend.^[18]

• The games Mad Gab and Babble-On feature mondegreens as puzzles for players to solve.

• When Chaka Khan sang her pop hit song, I'm Every Woman, during the 1970s, it sounded like Climb Every Woman to some listeners.

[edit] See also

• Ambiguity
• Amphibology
• Double entendre
• Eggcorn
• Holorime
• Mad Gab
• Mairzy Doats
• Malapropism
• Relaxed pronunciation
• Soramimi

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy — Gavin Edwards, 1995. ISBN 0-671-50128-3
• When a Man Loves a Walnut — Gavin Edwards, 1997. ISBN 0-684-84567-9
• He's Got the Whole World in His Pants — Gavin Edwards, 1996. ISBN 0-684-82509-0
• Deck The Halls With Buddy Holly — Gavin Edwards, 1998. ISBN 0-060-95293-8
• Chocolate Moose for Dinner — Fred Gwynne, 1988. ISBN 0-671-66741-6

[edit] External links

• amiright.com — The Archive of Misheard Lyrics — A large collection of misheard lyrics
• Misheard lyrics to Christmas songs are immortalized as 'mondegreens' (from Snopes.com)