Amazing Stories from the Web
THE MYSTERIOUS LADY MONDEGREEN
Pre-Reading: Discussion Questions.
1. Can you always understand all the words in a song?
2. What is more difficult to understand, live speech or lyrics in a song?
In a scene from “Jumping Jack Flash”, an American film shot in the 1980’s, Whoopi Goldberg is trying to distinguish the words in a recording made by a popular rock group. She gets so frustrated at not understanding a line that she starts yelling, “Mick! Mick! Speak English!” Mick, as in Mick Jagger, the leading singer and performer in The Rolling Stones. Goldberg’s heroine needs the exact words because they may help her obtain a computer password, which in turn may save somebody’s life. This is Hollywood. Do such situations occur in real life? Does it ever happen that you wish to understand a song you like, but cannot do it, no matter how many times you try?
Like most English language teachers, I have come across numerous examples in various languages. Once I asked an American to listen to a recording together with my student group, to help us decipher one line. He listened several times, then sighed and said, about the singer, “I’m afraid the poor lady does not know what she is singing”. Meaning, he could not distinguish the words either. On another occasion, I brought a recording of a Russian song to my lesson with a group of American students. All of the students could speak Russian fluently. And after several tries, all of them confessed that they could not get anything but the first line of the song in question. Sometimes, we cannot distinguish what is said or sung. At other times, we may think that we hear something correctly because we manage to construct a sensible phrase, when in fact we don’t.
There is a name for this phenomenon. According to The Free Dictionary, a mondegreen is the mishearing (usually accidental) of a phrase as a homophone or near-homophone in such a way that it acquires a new meaning. A mondegreen is a series of words that result from the mishearing of a statement or lyric, creating an often humorous new meaning for the original phrase. The word “mondegreen” was coined in 1954 by American writer Sylvia Wright and is itself a mondegreen. In an essay “The Death of Lady Mondegreen”, which was published in Harper’s Magazine in November 1954, she wrote about her childhood experience. When her mother was reading a poem to her, what she thought she heard were the words, “and Lady Mondegreen”, which made perfect sense to her then. Much later in life, she learned that the actual line read, “And laid him on the green”. Psychologists argue that mondegreens crop up due to the natural human desire to make sense of any phrase.
Perhaps one of the most famous mondegreens is the misinterpretation of the line “there’s a bad moon on the rise” in Creedence Clearwater Revival’s song “Bad Moon Rising” as “there’s a bathroom on the right.”
Michael Quinion, creator and editor of the wonderful site World Wide Words, talks about mondegreens and gives his own examples. “Some years ago, the British newspaper the Guardian briefly ran a series in its Weekend supplement on Saturdays called “Come Again”, recounting the strange misunderstandings which occur when we don’t quite catch the words of a song lyric, a station announcement or other indistinct bit of language. That wonderful pattern-matching ability I’ve mentioned…comes into being and forces us to turn garble into sense, any sense, even if it’s nonsense”. Among the most famous mondegreens, this line from a Biblical psalm is listed:
Gladly the cross-eyed bear is really gladly, the cross I’ll bear.
The word mondegreen is not to be found in paper dictionaries, but it has many web pages.
Lady Mondegreen has a number of relations. One of them is Mrs. Malaprop, a character from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play “The Rivals”. The French expression mal a propos literally means ill-suited. Mrs. Malaprop often used the wrong but similar sounding words in her speech, to great comical effect. For example, she would say, “Let’s illiterate it!” instead of “Let’s obliterate it!”
Another relation is actually a real person, the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), who was notorious for what was later called spoonerisms. A spoonerism is an error in speech or deliberate play on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched. For example, a weather announcer said, “Rowdy and clain”, instead of, “Cloudy and rain”. It is known that when people try to correct themselves in such situations, usually they only make things worse, producing more spoonerisms.
People have always been fascinated by these phenomena, be it mispronunciation, misuse, or misunderstanding. One can find whole books devoted to mondegreens, malapropisms, and spoonerisms, as well as chapters devoted to them in various humor collections, dictionaries, and on many web sites.
If you are interested in the subject, you may use the following web sites:
thefreedictionary.com; worldwidewords.org