Friday, February 12, 2010

There's a bathroom on the right

When she was a child, the American writer Sylvia Wright recalled, her mother read aloud to her from "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," and one of her favorite poems began, as she remembered:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O'Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
The actual fourth line is, "And laid him on the green."

In an essay in 1954, "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," 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."

Among the more well-known mondegreens:
  • Surely Good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life ("Surely goodness and mercy…" from Psalm 23)
  • Gladly, the cross-eyed bear(from the line in the hymn, "Keep Thou My Way" ("Kept by Thy tender care, gladly the cross I'll bear")
  • 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy (from a lyric in the song "Purple Haze", by Jimi Hendrix: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky").
And, of course ...
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") 
And a few more:
  • "The girl with colitis goes by." (Real lyric: "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes," Beatles)
  • "Olive, the other reindeer." (Real lyric: "All of the other reindeer.")
  • "The ants are my friends, they're blowing in the wind." (Real lyric: "The answer is blowing in the wind," Bob Dylan.)
  • "There's a wino down the road." (Real lyric: "And as we wind on down the road," Led Zeppelin.)
  • "In a glob of Velveeta, honey." (Real lyric: "In-A-Gadda Da Vida," a.k.a., "In the garden of Eden," Iron Butterfly.)

4 comments:

DANIELBLOOM said...

Sir, this is a brilliant and timely blogpost, and who knew? When the guys over at TestyCopywriters came up with "crash blossoms" as a new term for strangedly-worded news headlines (with the New York Times' Ben Zimmer doing a nice summary of the entire enterprise, and giving "crash blossoms" the push they needed to become a part of newsroom nomenclature), little did anyone know that "mondegreens" was another wonderful term, this time for misquotes of mis-remembered lines of poetry or lyrics of songs. I hereby say BRAVO for finding this meme and let's tell Ben Zimmer about this, maybe this will make a future On Language column of his for the Times. I love it. I will blog on this right now, crediting your blog for bringing it to the world's attention (again) and let's see how far this can travel. I am sure many people around the world will get a kick out of this, in the same way that crash blossoms touched an apparent funny bone in many people. Ben, have you ever heard of this mondegreens term? Here's the inside skinny: see this blog.

DANIELBLOOM said...

http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-see-by-snailpapers-that-sylvia-wright.html

Terry
see here, i found out there is even a video artiste who calls herself Lady Mondegreen and posts on YouTube. I have alerted Ben Zimmer at the Times. This story has legs, and all credit goes to you for UNEARTHING this gem. How did you chance upon it?

Danny

http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-see-by-snailpapers-that-sylvia-wright.html

DANIELBLOOM said...

Terry a top word maven told me today

-- I know all about mondegreens already. Safire talked about them in one of his early columns (back in May '1979):

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40813FF3A5413718DDDAE0A94DD405B898BF1D3

And Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle has been a big booster of the term:

http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/mondegreens.shtml

It entered the OED in 2002 and Merriam-Webster in 2008, as mentioned here:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/1452/

DANIELBLOOM said...

Lady Mondegreen commented on your wall post:

"Sorry to be so long getting back to you, Danny - yes, that poem is where the term for a misheard lyric (or phrase) originally came from. I could think of no better nom de plume for a parody artist, can you? ;) And THANK YOU for the link and spreading the filky love!"