Mondegreen

Posted by Tom Joad on Jan 25, 2008 | 3 comments

Thanks once again to Daphne, a regular reader and rapidly becoming a regular contributor on this blog! The thanks are not only for this excellent piece but for spontaneously helping me out in what has been a very busy week. So without further ado…

Mondegreen is not the name of a French ecological movement, but is a misheard phrase or song lyric, or prayer, or slogan, akin to a pun, increasingly common with the barely comprehensible pronunciation in American rock music.

The word mondegreen is in itself a mondegreen, if you follow me, coined by American writer Sylvia Wright, who as a child misheard the last line of this Scots poem:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands/Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O’Murray/And laid him on the green.

(Lady Mondegreen – y’see?).

Biblical passages are often deliberately misquoted for comic effect: viz. the tenacious Irish lady who pops up in Psalm 23:

“Surely Good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life”

Well-known hymns are fair game, particularly when they are supposed to elicit po-faced respect and reverence. American schoolchildren were reduced to giggles on finding a Hispanic man in the national anthem:

“Say, Jose, can you see, by the dawn’s early light …”

Christmas carols usually throw up a rich seam of mishearability : “While shepherds washed their socks by night” always livened up the school carol service. A mondegreen should make sense in its own right, although what constitutes “sense” is all relative. Someone I know invented the word “mansheera” by misquoting the lyrics of The Stranglers’ “Golden Brown”:

“golden brown, texture like sun, lays me down with my mansheera …”

I think he imagined it to be something like a security blanket. Unless, being a football fan and from the north-east, he was thinking “with my man Shearer ….”. I do hope not. I was married to him at the time. (The misquoter, not Alan Shearer).

Jimi Hendrix displayed unexpected comedic talent when he mischievously adjusted the words of “Purple Haze” and sang “Scuse me while I kiss this guy”. A million women burst into tears from disappointment.

The American pronunciation confounds many a listener on both sides of the pond. According to the eponymous song, Shaft, the first black cop hero in popular American culture, was a “carpet-cleaning man, and no-one understands him but his woman”.

Thanks to Wikipedia, and Jon Carroll at sfgate.com for some of the above examples.

And thank you once again Daphne. My favourite was always the one from Bohemian Rhapsody: “Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard”. Well, I suppose he has men just standing around…