Mondegreen

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A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song, due to near homophony, in a way that yields a new meaning to the phrase.^[1][2]

Etymology

The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term mondegreen in her essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," which was published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954.^[3] In the essay, Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the final line of the first stanza 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,

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")

Mondegreen was included in the 2000 edition of the Random House Webster's College Dictionary. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary added the word in 2008.^[4][5]

It should not be confused with soramimi, which are songs that produce different meanings from those originally intended, when interpreted in another language.

Examples

Examples in song lyrics

• The top 3 mondegreens submitted regularly to mondegreen expert Jon Carroll are:^[1]

1. "Gladly, the cross-eyed bear^[3] (from the line in the hymn "Keep Thou My Way" by Fanny Crosby, "Kept by Thy tender care, gladly the cross I'll bear")^[6] Carroll and many others quote it as "Gladly the cross I'd bear".
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.^[7][8][9]

• "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.^[10]

• When Bob Dylan offered marijuana to The Beatles, he was surprised to find they had not tried it before; he had misheard the lyric "I can't hide" in "I Want to Hold Your Hand" as "I get high".^[11]

• 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.^[12]

• The song "Sea Lion Woman," originally recorded in 1939 by Christine and Katherine Shipp, is another famous mondegreen, as it was performed by Nina Simone under the title "See Line Woman" and later by Feist as "Sealion". According to the liner notes from the compilation "A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings," the actual title of this playground song might also be "See [the] Lyin' Woman" or "C-Line Woman."^[13]

• The song "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," originally recorded in 1969 by The Band was, when covered by Joan Baez in 1971, full of mondegreens. For example, she changes the narrator, Virgil Caine, from a farmer to a laborer with the words,"Like my father before me, I'm a working man." The original lyrics were, "Like my father before me, I will work the land." Baez later admitted that she sang the song the way she heard it on a recording, and had never seen the printed lyrics. The Baez version later reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100.

• The cover version of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi", by Counting Crows, often has the refrain mistakened as, "They paved paradise and they put up a fucking lie", whereas the actual last two words are parking lot due to the lyrics being delivered in a rapid pace.

Examples in literature

• In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Mr. Tumnus mishears Lucy and so supposes that she comes from the city of War Drobe in the country of Spare Oom.^[14]

• In The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, reference is made to Laura Wingfield's bout with pleurosis during high school. At the time, Laura entertained timid but romantic feelings for Jim, who upon asking about her absence, mistakenly hears her say "blue roses" and carelessly adopts the moniker for her.

• In The World According to Garp by John Irving, Garp's young child is warned to beware of the undertow while bathing in the sea. Garp realizes later that the child had understood "Under Toad" and pictured a mischievous creature under the sea surface.

Examples in television

• "Mondegreens" is the name of a segment on the Australian music quiz show Spicks and Specks (ABC TV).^[15]
• In the CBS sitcom The Nanny, "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."^[1]
• The television special Olive, the Other Reindeer features a dog named Olive who thinks the line "all of the other reindeer" refers to her.
• The Family Guy theme includes a portion where Stewie Griffin says "Laugh and cry." Creator Seth MacFarlane has acknowledged (on the DVD commentary to Death Has a Shadow) that there is a large following that believes Stewie actually says "Effin cry".
• In the sitcom Friends, "Hold me closer tiny dancer," from the song "Tiny Dancer", is misheard as "Hold me closer, Tony Danza."

Reverse mondegreen

• 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 clue to the 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."

The listener can figure out that the last line of the refrain is "A kid'll eat ivy, too; wouldn't you?", but this line is sung only as a mondegreen.

Deliberate mondegreen

• In the Britney Spears song "If U Seek Amy," the lyric All of the boys and all of the girls are begging to if you seek Amy can easily be misheard as All of the boys and all of the girls are begging to F-U-C-K me. This resembles previous uses of the lyric "if you see Kay", employed by blues pianist Memphis Slim in 1963, R. Stevie Moore in 1977, April Wine on their 1982 album Power Play, the Poster Children in 1990, and Turbonegro in 2005, as well as a line from James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses.^[16]
• The liner notes in the album Ænima by the metal band Tool feature the phrase see you auntie.^[17]

See also

References

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

External links

Look up mondegreen in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Misheard lyrics to Christmas songs are immortalized as 'mondegreens' (from Snopes.com)
• "Mondegreens Ripped My Flesh" - columns by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll
• Man-bol lists numerous Hindi mondegreens, mainly from Bollywood movie songs

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