Mondegreen

I knew when I nominated this theme of Mondegreen that it would prove a tricky customer. I'm starting with a visual pun. What do you see in the image below? I'll caption it for you...

"I, Mondegreen"

But seriously, what's this really all about? Well, it began with Sylvia's mother. Not the one made famous in the lyrics of a song by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show in 1972, though lyrics are central to the theme of today's blog, rather the one who used to read poetry to her daughter, Sylvia Wright. 

Young Sylvia, who in a later age might have been dubbed 'Little Miss Hearing' by Roger Hargreaves, grew up to be a freelance journalist and author. She was born during WWI, attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and after graduating became an editor of books and magazines, most notably Harpers Bazaar, for which she also wrote regular columns, some of which articles were gathered together in the 1957 collection 'Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts'. She also wrote one novel, 'A Shark Infested Rice Pudding'. (I've not read it.)

And it was one of her pieces for Harpers, in 1954, that gave rise to the whole mondegreen thing. In it she recounted a memory from her childhood of her mother reading poetry to her from 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry', specifically a 17th century poem titled 'The Bonnie Earl o' Moray'. (Never mind that it was Scottish!) It included the couplet "They hae ta’en the Earl o’ Murray/ And laid him on the green", which Sylvia misheard as "They hae ta’en the Earl o’ Murray/ And Lady Mondegreen".

Wittingly or otherwise, Sylvia Wright had given a name to a phenomenon we are surely all familiar with, the act of mis-hearing a spoken or sung word or phrase and mistakenly believing it says something else, even going so far as to say or sing the incorrect version ourselves repeatedly. 

Sylvia Wright mis-hearing

Mondegreen, a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning, soon entered literary parlance and various linguists have collected famous mondegreens and analysed how the phenomenon may have helped shape the written versions of lyrics that for generations were passed on as part of an oral tradition. There have even been attempts to 'reverse engineer' some phrases, to suggest their original pre-mondegreen form.

However, it took the best part of fifty years for Sylvia Wright's neologism to get formally accepted in the likes of Webster's College Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the mid 1970s I was doing a postgraduate course at Exeter University and shared a flat for a while with a friend who was particularly prone to the mondegreen effect, especially when it came to the lyrics of Bob Dylan, whose masterpiece LP 'Blood On The Tracks' had recently been released. We indulged in many lively debates/ disagreements about several of the songs on that album. Mind you, Dylan's enunciation has always favoured mis-hearings, and this was in the days before the words to songs were routinely provided as part of the package. 

And Dylan himself famously had been guilty of mis-hearing a Beatles lyric back in 1964. When he first met them in New York that year and offered them some prime cannabis, he was surprised to learn they'd never tried it before, because he'd always assumed that in 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' they were singing "I get high", when in fact they sang "I can't hide", proof, if it was needed, that one aspect of the mondegreen phenomenon is that one often hears what one expects to hear. 

Bob Dylan

I'm not including a new poem today as I've been churning out haiku daily (as part of a musical advent calendar project on Facebook). Instead, I'll regale you with snippets of some of the lines we disagreed over, and about which he was incorrigibly in the wrong - because that's often another aspect of the mondegreen phenomenon. Mis-hearings are hard to shift.

From 'Tangled Up In Blue':

"split up on the docks that night, both agreeing it was best"; correct version goes "split up on a dark sad night".

"every one of them words rang true and quoted Leonard Cohen"; correct version goes "glowed like burning coal".

From 'Idiot Wind':

"said beware of lighting up a Lucky Strike"; correct version goes "of lightning that might strike".

From 'You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go':

"mine have been like the lanes and rambled"; correct version goes "like Verlaine's and Rimbaud's."

Sylvia Wright died aged sixty-four in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is not recorded if her tomb states "Here Lies Lady Mondegreen."

Thanks for reading, have a good week. S ;-)

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Mondegreen

I had no idea what a mondegreen was before starting this blog and when I did find out via google then I was surprised that it was such a recent addition to the English language. It was introduced into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002 after first being created in 1954 by the American writer Sylvia Wright who recalled a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad 'The Bonnie Earl o' Moray', and mishearing the words "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen".

James, Earl of Moray

So, it is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.

Just think about how we hear and understand all the noises we are hearing at any one time. I’ve just heard a car go by, some people are talking quietly as they pass my front door, there is a slight hum of traffic in the distance. Those noises are sound waves entering my ear and into the auditory cortex of my brain. There the sounds, which are just noise at the time, are separated into sounds that are meaningful to me. That sound of the car is not the sound of a bird. Considering all the information that is being processed at any one time it is truly amazing that we can make sense of the world.

However, very occasionally we can be misled by the context, the simplest cases occur when we just mishear something: it’s noisy, and we lack the visual cues to help us out (this can happen on the phone, on the radio, across cubicles, basically anytime we can’t see the mouth of the speaker).

One of the reasons we often mishear song lyrics is that there’s a lot of noise to get through, and we usually can’t see the musicians’ faces. Other times, the misperceptions come from the nature of the speech itself, for example when someone speaks in an unfamiliar accent or when the usual structure of stresses and inflections changes, as it does in a poem or a song. What should be clear becomes ambiguous, and the brain must do its best to resolve the ambiguity and choose the meaning that makes the most sense.

When I was looking up examples that resonated with me these two sprang out:
“There's a bathroom on the right" for "There's a bad moon on the rise" in 'Bad Moon Rising' by Creedence Clearwater Revival and “'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" for the Jimi Hendrix lyric "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" in 'Purple Haze'.

Jimi Hendrix

Mondegreens aren’t limited to modern music. One of the more common ones is hearing “Gladly the cross-eyed bear” for the line “Gladly the cross I’d bear” in the hymn 'Keep Thou My Way'. In fact our brains are exceptional creators of logical meaning, even when it’s not quite the intended one. Some mondegreens are so plausible that they can become the real thing. “Spitting image” was once a mondegreen, a mishearing and improper syllabic split of “spit and image.” (Spit is another term for likeness.) When you eat an orange, you’re actually consuming “a naranj” (from Persian and Sanskrit). Your nickname is, historically speaking “an ekename,” or an additional name.

To repeat what I’ve said above, mondegreens are funny, give us insight into the underlying nature of linguistic processing and how our minds make meaning out of sound. It comes naturally, easily, effortlessly at which point we can consider the problems of speech-recognition software, which, despite recent improvements, still usually generate a mix and muddle of whatever a user was trying to say.

Some of the above is from an article by Maria Konnikova in The New Yorker.

As Mondegreens are an audio effect, it is hopeless to find a visual equivalent so I’m reproducing the poem that Sylvia Wright heard:

The Bonnie Earl o' Moray

Ye Hielan’s and ye Lawlan’s,
O, whaure hae ye been?
They hae ta’en the Earl o’ Murray
And laid him on the green.

He was a braw callant
And he played at the ring,
And the bonnie Earl o’ Murray
He might hae been a king.

O, lang will his ladie
Look frae the castle doon,
Ere the bonnie Earl o’ Murray
Comed soondin’ through the toon.

O, wae betide ye Huntly
And whaurfore did ye sae?
I bade ye bring him tae me
And forbade ye him to slay.

He was a braw callant
And he played at the ba’,
And the bonnie Earl o’ Murray
Was the flooer amang them a’.

                                (author unknown, 17th century)

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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