From Susan/Miranda:
We usually speak of significant words on this blog: emotional, educational, historical, twenty-five-dollar words, words that can make or break both your current masterpiece-in-progress and commuter-escape-read, as well as plump up SAT scores.
But words can be silly, too, and that’s where I’m going today.
I recently ordered the full eleven-volume set of 17th century Englishman Samuel Pepys’s complete
unedited diaries from an internet used-book-seller. When the UPS man thumped on the door, I gleefully (yeah, I know, I know, Nerd-o-rama) announced that my fifteen pounds of Pepys had finally arrived. At once my teenaged daughter appeared to watch over my shoulder as I slit open the large box.
“Oh, Mom,” she said with disgust. “It’s just more books.”
. . . . and not, as she’d hoped, fifteen glorious pounds of glistening, sugary, neon-yellow Marshmallow Peeps. (For more about Samuel, see my Twelfth Night blog from last week; for more about the marshmallow kind, well, just wait another week or two, when the Easter candy appears in the stores. )
Hearing Peeps for Pepys is a mondegreen. Like malaprops, mondegreens are word-gaffes based on misunderstandings, a lyric, word, or expression heard incorrectly with often hilarious results. I’ve only learned of the term this week, thanks to Susan/Sarah (yes, THIS is the sort of nonsense writers discuss among themselves!) though of course I’ve been aware of the effect for years –– as has anyone who thinks the last line of “Silent Night” is “sleep in heavenly peas,” or that two-liter bottles of Coke are the “cheerleader” size, or that modern life makes for a “doggy-dog world” rather than a “dog eat dog” one, or that the American national anthem is an early example of multiculturalism: “Jose, can you see…”
The word “mondegreen” is in itself an example. In a 1954 essay in Harper’s Magazine, writer Sylvia Wright coined the term based on her own experience:
“When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me [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 Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.”
The actual last line is “And laid him on the green” –- reason enough for Wright to say of future mishearings, “I shall hereafter call them mondegreens.” The name has stuck in popular culture, if not yet in formal dictionaries of grammar.
Many of the most famous mondegreens seem to come from music lyrics. Currently there’s a TV ad that features a couple of nimrods downloading the Clash’s 80s hit “Rock the Kasbah” as “Stop the Catbox.” Yet how many of us really believed the words to the old Credence Clearwater song weren’t “There’s a bad moon out tonight”, but “There’s a bathroom on the right”? Or that the gospel classic is “He’s Got the Whole World in His Pants"? And my personal favorite: the Elton John song “Tiny Dancer” morphing into “Hold me closer, Tony Danza.”
Closed-captioning on TV has also provided a lush new source for mondegreens. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll has made a cause-celebre of recording these and other mondegreens (His site is called "Mondegreens Ripped My Flesh": http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/mondegreens.shtml) A few choice ones include a “meteorologist” who somehow became a “meaty urologist”. During a broadcast of the Olympics, one team was converted from “Hungarian swimmers” to “Hung Aryan swimmers.” And of course there’s the best-selling memoir “My Sergei”, aka “Mice Are Gay.”
So now it’s your turn. It’s Monday: what else do you have to do, anyway? Any and all examples are welcome!