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The word "mondegreen" is itself a mondegreen. The American writer Sylvia Wright coined it in an essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen", which was published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954. She wrote:
When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me... One of my favorite [Scots ] poems began, as I remember:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where ha(v)e ye been?
They ha(v)e slain the Earl Amurray, [=Of Murray]
And Lady Mondegreen.
The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green."
Other examples include:
Shirley, 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 Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade)
"There's a bathroom on the right" instead of "There's a bad moon on the rise," in Fogerty's Bad Moon Rising
A Wayne in a manger
Brown John verging mother and child (Silent night, holy night)
"My aunty's got sixty-five roses" (cystic fibrosis)
"Australians all let us ring Joyce, for she is young and free" ("Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free," from the Australian National anthem)-And from a novelty song much played in the last century:
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wooden shoe (Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy; a kid'll eat ivy, too, wouldn't you?)
Incidentally, Gervase Phinn (see picture) is bloody funny. Especially since his job was as a School Inspector, a profession not widely noted for its humour.
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I have my own contribution. When I was in Germany, many years ago, Bad Moon Rising was in the charts and I remember being asked what the line "Looks like..." meant.
My German acquaintances heard it as "Luftschlag" ( A blow, a strike to the air)
Brilliant, Finrod! I LOVE mondegreens. I have a couple books of them (my favorite being ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy by Gavin Edwards) and um, I’ve been guilty of a good handful myself. =/
For example, for the first ten years of my life I swore that the Beach Boys song “Barbara Ann” was in fact called “Bop A Ram,” though I had absolutely no idea why they would be singing about hitting male sheep.
ROFL!
Well spotted, iyp.
Reading "Charlie and the Great Glass elevator " to my son I think I may have found a few of these eg:
"knock knock,"said the president.
"Who's there?"said the chief spy.
"Courteney."
"Courteney who?"
"Courteney one yet?" said the president.
Finrod, if you have never read anything by Richard Lederer, you definitely should in the near future. I just got his book More Anguished English recently (a sequel to a first volume of Anguished English, of course) and in his chapters devoted to all sorts of verbal blunders, there’s one on mondegreens. I laughed as I saw some common misinterpretations that I myself had held in years past—for example, “pre-Madonna” for “prima donna” and “up and Adam” for “up and at ‘em.”
He’s a brilliant studier of language, and I think you’d really enjoy his work.
(And I find it funny that "Mairzy Doats" should be mentioned in the description, as my dad and grandpa often sang that to me as a young child, so it still reverberates in my psyche.)You could have a pre-Madonna prima donna...
Name duly noted, iyp. I (rightly or wrongly) associate Mairzy Doats in my memory with Dean Martin singing it on the radio many years ago.
PS 'Up and Adam' works best with an American accent.
Yeah, that’s a particularly Midwestern thing, pronouncing Ts like Ds or just dropping them altogether—I fully realized the extent of my accent when I once caught myself pronouncing “dentist” as “Dennis!” =/
But then again, there are a lot of things that you can do in a British accent but not an American one, like rhyming “ask her” with “Alaska,” for example, since we give full value to our Rs. (But digressing slightly, I always wondered how a Briton could be a pirate with that vocal idiosyncrasy, since “Arrrrrr” would come out as “Ahhhhh!” Not exactly as fearsome.)
There is huge variation across different dialects (By the way, pirates can be found here).
There's a pun in an early Frasier episode between 'corner' and 'coroner' which fails completely in a British accent, for another example. Strange to say, the actor who delivered it (John Mahoney, playing Frasier's father) was born in Manchester, quite close to where I am.