Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Mondegreen? Get the hell off it, then!
In a recent AP story*, I learned that Webster’s Collegiate recently had added 100 new words to their dictionary, including such head-scratchers as “dirty bomb” (it took them this long to add that?) and edamame (if I’ve been eating it for over twenty years, it sure as hell better be in the dictionary). One new addition is mondegreen, defined as a word or phrase frequently mistaken for another word or phrase . . .
It comes from an old Scottish ballad in which the lyric “laid him on the green” has been confused over time with “Lady Mondegreen.”
The AP story provides a few examples: ‘Lucy in the sky with Linus,’ from the Beatles song of almost the same name; ‘there’s a bathroom on the right’ (Creedence Clearwater’s ‘there’s a bad moon on the rise’); and “‘scuse me while I kiss this guy” (kiss the sky — Hendrix).
Funny how all of these come from song lyrics, but that’s all I can generate, too. Iron Butterfly’s “In A Gadda Da Vida” came to mind, and Wikipedia confirmed that the title may be a mondegreen of “In the Garden of Eden,” or perhaps, “In the Garden of Venus.” Also, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” is full of mondegreens.
Guess that Bob Dylan song.
The challenge is coming up with mondegreens not derived from song lyrics. The American Pledge of Allegiance has a famous one (who the hell is Richard Stands, after all? or is it “where witches stand”?) And when I was a med student, one of my dictations — “a large abdominal aortic aneurysm” — became “a large abdominal area cancerism.”
“Cancerism” still makes me cringe. What a word!
Also in the medical vein (sorry, sorry, I know we’re not doing puns today), there’s a famous one, perhaps apocryphal, that has a woman believing “fibroids of the uterus” is actually “fireballs of the Eucharist.” Christ the Avenger, I guess.
When I snuck a look at the Wikipedia entry, I saw that a whole song was composed of mondegreens. Release date 1943, and one of the writers shared my last name. Can you guess it without cheating?
How about it — do you have any favorite mondegreens?
D.
*AP had a hissy fit not long ago about bloggers linking to and quoting from their articles. Why they want to shoot themselves in the foot like this, I don’t know — but fine, I’ll reference it without providing a link or attribution. Nyah, nyah.
Oh, and here’s a whole great pile of mondegreens, if you’re enjoying this.
In addition to Simon alone, there are still more Simon and Garfunkel mondegreens, including Aaron Bernstein’s mishearing of “silence like a cancer grows” as “silence like a casserole” (from the hit song “The Covered Dishes of Silence”), and Clare Tiss’ joyful singing of “I have a watch, I have it o-o-o-o-o-n . . .”
“I am rock, I am an island,” of course. Makes more sense if you’ve heard it.
I have a fade in my hearing that leads to constant Mondegreens in conversation. I find them very amusing. So far as music goes, I never got the Guy in Hendrix (ponder that thought) but I did always hear Ozzy singing “No Bowel Movements” instead of No Bone Movies.
As it’s on topic, Here’s Joe Cocker singing an Ode to Mondegreens! (Did you see it on Friday at SBTB?)
How about “revved up like a douche”? I imagine they thought of that one but chose not to print it!
Not a song lyric, but “Our Father, who is Art in Heaven…” (They covered that on Night Court.)
I know there are lots more, but those are the only two I can think of right now.
Lyvvie, I’ll have to check that later when I’m back in the land of high speed.
Dan, how could I forget Blinded by the Light? Although I always thought it was, “wrapped up like a douche.” What, they put it in a white cardboard box with a pretty floral pattern?
When my mom was little, she thought the hymn they sang in church was “God sees the little sparrow fall, its meat is tender too”. And when my sister got mad (she was 3), she’d warn us “God will smoke you!”