Mondegreen

A mondegreen /ˈmɒndᵻɡriːn/ is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning.

Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar, and make some kind of sense.[1][2] American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in her essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen", published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954. The term was inspired by "...and Lady Mondegreen", a misinterpretation of the line "...and laid him on the green" from the Scottish ballad "The Bonnie Earl O' Moray".[3] "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] The phenomenon is not limited to English, with examples cited by Fyodor Dostoyevsky,[6] in the Hebrew song "Háva Nagíla" ("Let's Be Happy"),[7] and in Bollywood movies.[8]

A closely related category is a Hobson-Jobson, where a word from a foreign language is homophonically translated into one's own language, e.g. cockroach from Spanish cucaracha.[9][10] For misheard lyrics this phenomenon is called soramimi.[11] An unintentionally incorrect use of similar-sounding words or phrases in speaking is a malapropism. If there is a connection in meaning, it can be called an eggcorn. If a person stubbornly sticks to a mispronunciation after being corrected, that person has committed a mumpsimus.[12]

Etymology

In the essay, Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the last line of the first stanza from the 17th-century ballad "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray". 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 o' Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.[3]

The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green". 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."[3]

Her essay had already described the bonny Earl holding the beautiful Lady Mondegreen's hand, both bleeding profusely but faithful unto death. She disputed:

"I know, but I won't give in to it. Leaving him to die all alone without even anyone to hold his hand--I WON'T HAVE IT!!!"[3]

Other examples Wright suggested are:

Psychology

Human beings interpret their environment partially based on experience, and this includes speech perception. People are more likely to notice what they expect than things not part of their everyday experiences, and they may mistake an unfamiliar stimulus for a familiar and more plausible version. For example, to consider a well-known mondegreen in the song "Purple Haze", one would be more likely to hear Hendrix singing that he is about to kiss this guy than that he is about to kiss the sky.[13] Similarly, if a lyric uses words or phrases that the listener is unfamiliar with, they may be misheard as using more familiar terms.

The creation of mondegreens may be driven in part by a phenomenon akin to cognitive dissonance, as the listener may find it psychologically uncomfortable to listen to a song and not be able to make out the words, particularly if the listener is fluent in the language of the lyrics. Steven Connor suggests that mondegreens are the result of the brain's constant attempts to make sense of the world by making assumptions to fill in the gaps when it cannot clearly determine what it is hearing. Connor sees mondegreens as the "wrenchings of nonsense into sense".[lower-alpha 1]

On the other hand, Steven Pinker has observed that mondegreen mishearings tend to be less plausible than the original lyrics, and that once a listener has "locked in" to a particular misheard interpretation of a song's lyrics, it can remain unquestioned, even when that plausibility becomes strained (for more on this sort of stubbornness, see Mumpsimus). Pinker gives the example of a student "stubbornly" mishearing the chorus to "I'm Your Venus" as I'm your penis, and being surprised that the song was allowed on the radio.[14]

James Gleick claims that the mondegreen is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Although people have no doubt misconstrued song lyrics for as long as songs have been sung, without improved communication and the language standardization that accompanies it, he believes there would have been no way to recognize and discuss this shared experience.[15] Since time immemorial, songs have been passed on by word of mouth. Just as mondegreens transform songs based on experience, a folk song learned by repetition of heard lyrics is often transformed over time when sung by people in a region where some of the song's references have become obscure. A classic example is "The Golden Vanity", which contains the line "As she sailed upon the lowland sea". English immigrants carried the song to Appalachia, where singers, not knowing what the term lowland sea refers to, transformed it over generations from "lowland" to "lonesome".[16]

Examples

Main article: List of Mondegreens

In songs

The top three 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 and Theodore E. Perkins, "Kept by Thy tender care, gladly the cross I'll bear").[17] Carroll and many others quote it as "Gladly the cross I'd bear"; They Might Be Giants allude to this line and its mishearing in their title album's song "Hide Away, Folk Family", which contains the line "And sadly the cross-eyed bear's been put to sleep behind the stairs".
  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 The Jimi Hendrix Experience: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky").

Both Creedence's John Fogerty and Hendrix eventually acknowledged these mishearings by deliberately singing the "mondegreen" versions of their songs in concert.[18][19][20]

The 1963 song "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen was so difficult to understand, because of how poorly the Kingsmen's version of it was recorded, that many people suspected the song contained obscene lyrics. The FBI was asked to investigate whether or not those involved with the song violated laws against the interstate transportation of obscene material. The most notable misinterpretation of the lyrics presented by the parent who sent the complaint can be found in the verse "Me see Jamaica moon above; / It won't be long me see me love. / Me take her in my arms and then / I tell her I never leave again".[21] which was misheard as "She had a rag on, she moved above. / It won't be long, she'll slip it off. / I held her in my arms and then, / and I told her I'd rather lay her again". No lyrics were ever officially published for the song, and after two years of investigation, the FBI concluded that the lyrics were unintelligible.[22]

Rap and hip hop lyrics may be particularly susceptible to being misheard because they do not necessarily follow standard pronunciations. The delivery of rap lyrics relies heavily upon an often regional pronunciation or non-traditional accenting of words and their phonemes to adhere to the artist's stylizations and the lyrics' written structure. This issue is exemplified in controversies over alleged transcription errors in Yale University Press's 2010 Anthology of Rap.[23]

"Blinded by the Light", a cover of a Bruce Springsteen song by Manfred Mann's Earth Band, contains what has been called "probably the most misheard lyric of all time".[24] The phrase "revved up like a deuce" (altered from Springsteen's original "cut loose like a deuce", both lyrics referring to the hot rodders slang for a 1932 Ford coupé) is frequently misheard as "wrapped up like a douche".[24][25] Springsteen himself has joked about the phenomenon, claiming that it was not until Manfred Mann rewrote the song to be about a "feminine hygiene product" that the song became popular.[26][lower-alpha 2]

Sometimes, the modified version of a lyric becomes standard, as is the case with "The Twelve Days of Christmas". The original has "four colly birds"[27] (colly means black; in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare wrote "Brief as the lighting in the collied night."[28]); sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, these became calling birds, which is the lyric used in the 1909 Frederic Austin version.[lower-alpha 3]

A number of misheard lyrics have been recorded, turning a mondegreen into a real title. The song "Sea Lion Woman", recorded in 1939 by Christine and Katherine Shipp, was performed by Nina Simone under the title "See Line Woman". 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".[29] Jack Lawrence's misinterpretation of the French phrase "pauvre Jean" ("poor John") as the identically pronounced "pauvres gens" ("poor people") led to the translation of La goualante du pauvre Jean ("The Ballad of Poor John") as "The Poor People of Paris", a hit song in 1956.[30]

Non-English language

Ghil'ad Zuckermann cites the Hebrew example mukhrakhím liyót saméakh ("we must be happy", with a grammar mistake) instead of (the high-register) úru 'akhím belév saméakh ("wake up, brothers, with a happy heart"), from the well-known song "Háva Nagíla" ("Let’s be happy").[31] The Israeli site dedicated to Hebrew mondegreens has coined the term "avatiach" (Hebrew for watermelon) for "mondegreen", named for a common mishearing of Shlomo Artzi's award-winning 1970 song "Ahavtia" ("I loved her", using a form uncommon in spoken Hebrew).[32]

The title of the film La Vie en rose depicting the life of Édith Piaf can be mistaken for "L'Avion rose" (The pink airplane).[33][34]

The French word "lapalissade", designating a gross truism or platitude, is derived from the name of Jacques II de Chabannes, Seigneur de La Palice, because of a misread mondegreen in a mourning song written just after his heroic death. Reading an "f" as a long "s" (ſ), "s’il n’était pas mort, il ferait encore envie" ("if he was not dead, he would still arouse envy") becomes "il serait encore en vie" ("he would still be alive"). This truism remains as the first and most well-known "lapalissade" in French.

In literature

The title of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is often mistaken for a mondegreen. The main character, Holden Caulfield, misremembers a sung version of the Robert Burns poem "Comin' Thro' the Rye": the line "Gin a body meet a body / comin' through the rye" is recalled as "Gin a body catch a body / comin' through the rye." This is not a mondegreen, but a result of a confabulation in Holden's psyche in line with the theme of the novel.

A Monk Swimming by author Malachy McCourt is so titled because of a childhood mishearing of a phrase from the Catholic rosary prayer, Hail Mary. "Amongst women" became "a monk swimmin'".[35]

Other examples

The traditional game Chinese whispers ("Telephone" in the United States) involves mishearing a whispered sentence to produce a mondegreen.

Among schoolchildren in the U.S., daily rote recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance has long provided opportunities for the genesis of mondegreens.[1][36][37]

Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in 1875, cited a line from Fyodor Glinka's song "Troika" (1825) "колокольчик, дар Валдая" ("the bell, gift of Valday") claiming that it is usually understood as "колокольчик, дарвалдая" ("the bell darvaldaying"—the onomatopoetic verb for ringing).[6]

The Turkish political party, the Democratic Party, changed its logo in 2007 to one of a white horse in front of a red background because rural voters often could not pronounce its Turkish name (Demokrat), instead saying demir kırat ("iron white-horse").

Reverse mondegreen

Some nonsensical lyrics can be interpreted homophonically as rational text. A prominent example is Mairzy Doats, a 1943 novelty song by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman, and Jerry Livingston.[38] The lyrics are a mondegreen and it is 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 clue to the meaning 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.

Other examples include:

Deliberate mondegreen

Two authors have written books of supposed foreign-language poetry that are actually mondegreens of nursery rhymes in English. Luis van Rooten's pseudo-French Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames includes critical, historical, and interpretive apparatus, as does John Hulme's Mörder Guss Reims, attributed to a fictitious German poet. Both titles sound like the phrase "Mother Goose Rhymes". Both works can also be considered soramimi, which produces different meanings when interpreted in another language. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced a similar effect in his canon "Difficile Lectu" (written c. 1786-87, when he was 30 or 31), which, though ostensibly in Latin, is actually an opportunity for scatological humor in both German and Italian.[39]

Some performers and writers have used deliberate mondegreens to create double entendres. The phrase "if you see Kay" (F-U-C-K) has been employed many times, notably as a line from James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses[40] and in many songs, including by blues pianist Memphis Slim in 1963, R. Stevie Moore in 1977, April Wine on its 1982 album Power Play, the Poster Children via their Daisy Chain Reaction in 1991, Turbonegro in 2005, Aerosmith in "Devil's Got a New Disguise in 2006, and The Script in their 2008 song "If You See Kay". Britney Spears did the same thing with the song "If U Seek Amy". A similar effect was created in Hindi in the 2011 Bollywood movie Delhi Belly in the song "Bhaag D.K. Bose". While "D. K. Bose" appears to be a person's name, it is sung repeatedly in the chorus to form the deliberate mondegreen "bhosadi ke" (Hindi: भोसडी के), a Hindi expletive.

"Mondegreen" is a song by Yeasayer on their 2010 album, Odd Blood. The lyrics are intentionally obscure (for instance, "Everybody sugar in my bed" and "Perhaps the pollen in the air turns us into a stapler") and spoken hastily to encourage the mondegreen effect.[41]

See also

Notes and references

Notes

  1. ↑ "But, though mishearings may appear pleasingly or even subversively to sabotage sense, they are in fact in essence negentropic, which is to say, they push up the slope from random noise to the redundancy of voice, moving therefore from the direction of nonsense to sense, of nondirection to direction. They seem to represent the intolerance of pure phenomena. In this they are different from the misspeakings with which they are often associated. Seeing slips of the ear as simply the auditory complement of slips of the tongue mistakes their programmatic nature and function. Misspeakings are the disorderings of sense by nonsense; mishearings are the wrenchings of nonsense into sense." Steven Connor (14 February 2009). "Earslips: Of Mishearings and Mondegreens".
  2. ↑ See this video of the mondegreen phenomenon in popular music."Top 10 Misheard Lyrics". Retrieved 18 Mar 2014.
  3. ↑ There was this review of the Austin arrangement in The Musical Times, November 1, 1909, p. 722: "'The twelve days of Christmas' is a clever arrangement of a traditional song of the cumulative or 'House that Jack built' type. 'What my love sent to me' on the first, second, third day of Christmas, and so on down to the twelfth, reveals a constantly increasing store of affection and generosity. The first day's gift is 'a partridge in a pear-tree'; that of the twelfth comprises 'Twelve drummers drumming, eleven pipers playing, ten lords a-leaping, nine ladies dancing, eight maids a-milking, seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, five gold rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle-doves and a partridge in a pear-tree.' No explanation is given of any subtle significance that may underlie the lover's wayward choice of tokens of his regard. To the captivating, if elusive, tune of this song Mr. Austin has added an accompaniment that is always ingenious, especially where it suggests the air that is being played by the eleven pipers, always varied and interesting, and never out of place. The song is suitable for a medium voice.""Twelve Days of Christmas". Retrieved 2013-11-10.

Citations

  1. 1 2 3 "Zen and the Art Of Mondegreens".
  2. ↑ The Word Detective: "Green grow the lyrics" Retrieved on 2008-07-17
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Sylvia Wright (1954). "The Death of Lady Mondegreen". Harper's Magazine 209 (1254): 48–51. Drawings by Bernarda Bryson. Reprinted in: 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."
  4. ↑ CNN.com: Dictionary adds new batch of words. July 7, 2008.
  5. ↑ NBC News: Merriam-Webster adds words that have taken root among Americans
  6. 1 2 Достоевский Ф. М. Полное собрание сочинений: В 30 тт. Л., 1980. Т. 21. С. 264.
  7. ↑ Ghil'ad Zuckermann Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, (Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change, Series editor: Charles Jones). ISBN 1-4039-1723-X. 2003, p. 248. Archived February 1, 2014, at the Wayback Machine.
  8. ↑ Man-bol
  9. ↑ Cowan, William; Rakušan, Jaromira (1998). Source Book for Linguistics (Third revised ed.). John Benjamins. p. 179. ISBN 978-90-272-8548-5.
  10. ↑ "Hobson-Jobson". Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Retrieved July 28, 2014.
  11. ↑ Otake, Takashi (2007). "Interlingual near Homophonic Words and Phrases in L2 Listening: Evidence from Misheard Song Lyrics" (PDF). 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Saarbrücken: icphs2007.de. pp. 777–780. But whereas ordinary Mondegreen occurs within a single language, Soramimi awaa is unique in that it occurs cross-linguistically in hearing foreign songs
  12. ↑ Michael Quinion (17 Mar 2001). "World Wide Words".
  13. ↑ Ira Hyman (8 April 2011). "A Bathroom on the Right? Misheard and Misremembered Song Lyrics". Psychology Today.
  14. ↑ Steven Pinker (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow. pp. 182–183. ISBN 0-688-12141-1.
  15. ↑ James Gleick (2011). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon. ISBN 978-0-375-42372-7.
  16. ↑ "Sinking In The Lonesome Sea lyrics". Retrieved 19 August 2011.
  17. ↑ Frances Crosby. "Keep Thou My Way". The Cyber Hymnal. Retrieved 2006-09-06.
  18. ↑ "Did Jimi Hendrix really say, '′Scuse me, while I kiss this guy?'". Retrieved 2007-12-18.
  19. ↑ Letters, The Guardian, 26 April 2007.
  20. ↑ This can be heard on his 1998 live album Premonition. CCR/John Fogerty FAQ at superseventies.com.
  21. ↑ "Louie Louie". 2007. Retrieved June 28, 2011.
  22. ↑ "Louie Louie (The Song)". FBI. 1964. p. 3. Retrieved March 4, 2013.
  23. ↑ Article on Yale "Anthology of Rap" lyrics controversies, Slate.com, 2010.
  24. 1 2 Q: "Blinded By the Light, Revved Up Like a..." What?, Blogcritics Music
  25. ↑ The comedy show The Vacant Lot built an entire skit, called "Blinded by the Light", around four friends arguing about the lyrics. One version can be seen here: "The Vacant Lot - Blinded By The Light". 1993. Retrieved 25 Jan 2014.
  26. ↑ "Bruce Springsteen". VH1 Storytellers. Episode 62. 2005-04-23. VH1.
  27. ↑ "A Christmas Carol Treasury". The Hymns and Carols Of Christmas. Retrieved 2011-12-05.
  28. ↑ "Shakesepeare Navigators". Retrieved 2015-05-07.
  29. ↑ "A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings". Amazon.com. Retrieved May 14, 2009.
  30. ↑ Jack Lawrence, Songwriter: Poor People Of Paris
  31. ↑ Ghil'ad Zuckermann Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan (Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change, Series editor: Charles Jones). ISBN 1-4039-1723-X. 2003, p. 248.
  32. ↑ Avatiach - Hebrew mondegreens
  33. ↑ Crawford, Joanna (2010). A Displaced Person. AuthorHouse. p. 83. ISBN 978-1-4490-7988-8.
  34. ↑ "Awful Glimpse". The Aeroplane and astronautics 99: 145. 1960.
  35. ↑ "'A Monk Swimming': A Tragedian's Brother Finds More Comedy in Life". The New York Times.
  36. ↑ Francis Bellamy. ""Pledge of Allegiance" Funny Misheard Lyrics". Retrieved 18 July 2011. or, for instance: "...And to the republic; For which it stands; One nation underdog; With liver, tea, and justice for all."
  37. ↑ Lord, Bette Bao (1984). In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. New York: Harper. ISBN 978-0064401753. The main character Shirley recites, "I pledge a lesson to the frog of the United States of America, and to the wee puppet for witches’ hands. One Asian, in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all." Note that "under God" is missing because it was added in the 1950s, whereas the novel is set in 1947.
  38. ↑ Randall, Dale B. J. (1995). "American "Mairzy" Dottiness, Sir John Fastolf's Secretary, and the "Law French" of a Caroline Cavalier". American Speech (Duke University Press) 70 (4): 361–370. doi:10.2307/455617. JSTOR 455617.
  39. ↑ Hocquard, Jean-Victor (1999) Mozart ou la voix du comique. Maisonneuve & Larose, p. 203.
  40. ↑ Jesse Sheidlower (March 19, 2009). "If You Seek Amy's Ancestors". Slate.
  41. ↑ Montgomery, James (February 9, 2010). "Yeasayer Lead Us Through Odd Blood, Track By Track". MTV. Retrieved February 10, 2010.
Further reading

External links

Look up mondegreen in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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