14 May 2021
A 1592 “vendetta portrait” of James Stewart, the second Earl of Moray, painted to keep alive the memory of his murder. The body of a naked, dead man with a burial shroud strategically laid across his loins, showing wounds on his face, torso, and leg, and the words “God revenge my caus” written above.
What is a mondegreen you ask? It is a misheard song lyric (or other utterance), one where the phonemes can be interpreted to have an entirely different meaning than what the lyricist intended. Some examples include:
“Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear” (Gladly the Cross I’d Bear), from the hymn of that title
“A girl with colitis goes by” (a girl with kaleidoscope eyes), from Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds, by the Beatles
“Excuse me while I kiss this guy” (excuse me while I kiss the sky), from Purple Haze, by Jimi Hendrix
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hot cement” (who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men), catchphrase for the radio show The Shadow
And my personal favorite:
“He suffered under a bunch of spiders” (He suffered under Pontius Pilate), from the Apostle’s Creed
Mondegreen was coined by writer Sylvia Wright in 1954 in regard to a misheard lyric from her childhood. The song in question was the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl o’ Moray”:
Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands
O where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,
And hae laid him on the green.
The ballad is about the death of James Stewart, the second Earl of Moray, who was murdered in February 1591/92 by George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly.
In the November 1954 issue of Harper’s magazine, Wright described how, as a child, she misheard the lyrics to that ballad:
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 Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.I saw it all clearly. The Earl had yellow curly hair and a yellow beard and of course wore a kilt. He was lying in a forest clearing with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long, dark brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark green dress embroidered with light green leaves outlined in gold. It had a low neck trimmed with white lace (Irish lace, I think). An arrow had pierced her throat: from it blood trickled down over the lace. Sunlight coming through the leaves made dappled shadows on her cheeks and her closed eyelids. She was holding the Earl's hand.
It made me cry.
[...]
By now, several of you more alert readers are jumping up and down in your impatience to interrupt and point out that, according to the poem, after they killed the Earl of Murray, they laid him on the green. I know about this, 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.
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.
Within a few years mondegreen had entered into the psychological literature. From Robert Reiff and Martin Scheerer’s 1959 Memory and Hypnotic Age Regression:
In giving the Pledge of Allegiance test to the control and to the experimental subjects, we expected and predicted that at experimental age ten the regressed subjects would use more improper wording (Mondegreenisms) in writing the Pledge than the simulators would. [...] An example of improper wording is “One nation invisible.”
The term mondegreen, however, doesn’t appear again in mainstream print sources for almost two decades. Either it continued quietly in oral use or it disappeared, only to be remembered and revived in 1973 by Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith. He wrote the following in an 18 March 1973 piece that was syndicated in papers throughout the United States:
Charlotte Bernard of Los Angeles recalls a special kind of malapropism called a Mondegreen, derived from the author Sylvia Wright’s memories of a Scottish ballad her mother used to sing [....] As a child, Miss Wright always heard the last two lines as “Ye have slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen.” Thus the Mondegreen—a misheard phrase from a poem or song, such as “Lead me not into Penn Station,” and “Oh, say can you see by the Donzerly Light.”
And as we are reminded by David Curtis, of the English department at Corona del Mar High School—“Hollywood be Thy name.”
And in a 27 May 1979 New York Times Magazine column on malapropisms, metanalyses, and folk etymologies, William Safire wrote:
What all-inclusive term can we use to encompass the changes that our brains make in the intended meaning of what we hear? Linguists suggest “homophone,” “unwitting paronomasia” and “agnominatio,” but those terms sound like fancified dirty words to me.
I prefer “mondegreen.” This is a word coined in a 1954 Harper’s Magazine article, “The Death of Lady Mondegreen” by Sylvia Wright.
And he concludes with a plea for readers to stop sending him examples:
Thanks to responsive readers, I have a column on sound effects and whole closetful of mondegreens. But a nuff is a nuff.
Unlike Safire, if you have any good ones, send them my way.
Sources:
Mackie, R.L., ed. “The Bonny Earl o’ Moray.” A Book of Scottish Verse, second edition. London: Oxford UP, 1967, 143. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2019, s.v. mondegreen, n.
Reiff, Robert and Martin Scheerer. Memory and Hypnotic Age Regression. New York: International Universities Press, 1959, 126–27. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Safire, William. “On Language: I Led the Pigeons to the Flag.” New York Times Magazine, 27 May 1979, 9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Smith, Jack. “A Hobby Paceoff in Diffidence.” Los Angeles Times, 18 March 1973, D1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Wright, Sylvia. “The Death of Lady Mondegreen.” Harper’s, November 1954, 48–49. Harpers.org.
Image credit: Anonymous artist, 1592. Public domain image.