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Literary Review
Wordspeak
She did not die in vain
ANAND
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Lady Mondegreen lives on … in board games, music and every day conversation.
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You hear the announcer on a television commercial ask “Do you have a cute back pain?” and wonder until you remember the homophone acute.
I had my pre-high school education in a prestigious but pretentious school in North India where students like me, who did not live in the residence, were called ‘deskolars’. The term made no sense, but everyone used it. Years passed before I realised that we were ‘day scholars’.
Around the same time, I used to think that the second line of Christmas carol Silent Night was “….father’s come, all is bright.” It is “all’s calm, all is bright”, but the supposed reference to father, that is Santa Claus, made perfect sense.
Aural dyslexia
What gave me heart is that I soon found out that I was not the only one to suffer from this sort of ‘aural dyslexia’ when I formed a word or a phrase of my own after misinterpreting a word or phrase that I had heard. On growing up and learning about the good Viennese doctor’s contention that sometimes something you say is different from what you intended to say, and shows your true thoughts, I began calling it a Freudian slip. That is, until I discovered that there was a word to describe such mishearing, and the word was ‘mondegreen.’
Before we go into the origin of the word, let’s sample some more mondegreens:
You hear the announcer on a television commercial ask “Do you have a cute back pain?” and wonder until you remember the homophone acute. Or hear on television or radio that “The average American will gain 47 pounds during the holidays” when what actually said was “…4 to 7 pounds”.
Generations of school children who went to English-language schools, particularly those run by the Methodists, have thought that the Lord’s Prayer went “Our Father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy Name….” Perhaps an equal number of children have tried to find in some library a copy of the Charles Darwin classic “Oranges and Peaches.” Many a school child in the US is convinced unless told otherwise that it was “I pledge allegiance to the flag….” and not “I led the pigeons to the flag….”
There is nary a child, whether in India or in any other country, who has not ‘misheard’ a nursery rhyme, a hymn or a prayer, some name in his or her class room and in later years, the lyrics of a song. Although the examples I have quoted are in English, mondegreens surely are equally common in any other language.
Coining the term
The tern mondegreen was coined by the American writer Sylvia Wright in an essay “The Death of Lady Mondegreen”, which was published in Harper’s Magazine in November, 1954. In it she wrote, and I quote:
When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy’s Reliques. One of my favourite 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 line is “And laid him on the green”, from the anonymous 17th century ballad “The Bonnie Earl O’ Murray”.
Wright gives other examples of what she says, “I shall hereafter call mondegreens”, such as:
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” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson).
The imaginary Lady Mondegreen did not die in vain, for every occurrence of mishearing now bears her name. Here are some examples of Sylvia Wright’s neologism catching on:
“Mondegreen” is also a segment on the popular Australian music quiz show Spicks and Specks (ABC TV).
The board game Mad Gab features 1,200 mondegreens used as puzzles for players to solve.
Many mondegreens have given ideas for song parodies. Artists, like John Fogerty, have deliberately sung their songs as “mondegreens” in concerts, such as “There’s a bathroom on the right” in “Bad Moon Rising” instead of the correct “There’s a bad moon on the rise” to amuse the audience.
The term was the inspiration for the name of the US-British a capella vocal group Lady Mondegreen.
If above examples take this column’s readers on a trip down memory lane, I invite them to e-mail their own mondegreen to me. If examples are in languages other than English, give ample explanation of the ‘misheard’ part. Perhaps, just for fun, a few can be used in another column along with some of the most popular mondegreens in the world.
E-mail: anand@journalist.com (Please put ‘Wordspeak’ in subject box)
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