And Lady Mondegreen

Roll back the clock to some year in the 1980s, when I was a sassy little girl with too much on my mind and a mouth insufficient in size for delivering its contents to an audience. Much of what I said in my formative years was interpreted by adults as deliciously witty, mature “for my age,” and progressive. I attribute this to being born with an innate curiosity about everything. Nevertheless, my wonderings wandered into conversations at break-neck pace. Though received poorly by my peers, my spoken notions were typically handled with care by adults. So I spent much of my time soaking in their conversations and feeding them my own recipe of conversational tonic.

While these adult exchanges probably afforded me some sort of linguistic freedom, I was still only as emotionally mature as the years I had accumulated. Therefore, there were many concepts and realities that I couldn’t relate to, and that meant there were many things I had never heard before. This brings me to Lady Mondegreen.

A recent e-mail between a friend and me spurred this particular conversation topic. American writer, Sylvia Wright, coined the phrase “mondegreen” after learning that a line in a story her mother used to read her, Percy’s Reliques, had been misheard by her time and again. What she interpreted as “They hae slain the Earl O' Moray, And Lady Mondegreen,” was actually “They hae slain the Earl O’ Moray, and laid him on the green.”

My mother had an affinity, and still does, for using popular adages and proverbs such as “Better to be safe than sorry,” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” “Actions speak louder than words,” “A person is known by the company he keeps,” “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and a number of others. I grew up mingling with these trinkets of wisdom, and for the most part they’ve done right by me. However, sometimes what my ears heard and brain processed were two very different things.

My mom had a saying of her own that she used predominantly when I brandished my vocabulary like broadsword as defense to my mother’s instructions. Example: Mom would say, “Go brush your teeth, and get ready for bed.” To which I would reply, “No, you can’t make me.” To which she would reply, “Wanna make a bed?” And of course I would concede, because I did NOT want to make a bed. Unbeknownst to me (and I learned this only after years of thinking she was threatening to make me make a bed), she was actually challenging me with the saying; “Wanna make a bet?” As it turns out, it behooved my mom that I misheard her, because the one thing that usually got me in line was to threaten chores. But, had I known that she was actually saying, “Wanna make a bet?” I would have challenged her to a verbal dual.

Mondegreens are fun little ditties. This rings especially true for song lyrics, don’t you think? My favorite, partly because I listened to it growing up is the song Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival. I’ll never forget singing the chorus line, “There’s a bathroom on the right.” Granted, it probably doesn’t make much sense to sing “Well, it’s bound to take your life, there’s a bathroom on the right,” but as a kid, I thought it was a perfectly rational line, I thought the line was suggesting that if you’re life was about to end, you’d need a bathroom pretty bad before you messed yourself. Out of the mouths of babes.

Another couple favorites of mine are lines from Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy” (actually “’scuse me while I kiss the sky”), and Forever in Blue Jeans by Neil Diamond, “And as long as I can have you here with me, I’d much rather be, Reverend Blue Jeans” (actually “I’d much rather be, forever in blue jeans.”) And all that time, I thought Jimi was just a “friendly” guy and Neil was alluding to some New Age religious perversion.

Suddenly, it rings true what Slyvia Wright said, “The point that I shall hereafter call mondegreens…is that they are better than the original.”