Last year I wrote an article for the Broadside about a song by Bobby Newcomb called “The Sweet Forget Me Not”, a favourite of Gerald Campbell, the recipient of the 2005 St. John’s Folk Arts Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In the process, I stumbled upon a new word - Mondegreen. A mondegreen is what results when someone mishears a word or phrase, reinterprets what they heard, and in effect rewrites that part of a song or poem to give it new meaning. This actually describes a phenomenon with which I am very familiar, having created mondegreens myself many times in the past. Sometimes this new twist can change the whole feel of a song - for better, worse, or just plain different!

Before we get to some examples, where does this interesting word come from? According to multiple sources on the Internet, the word was invented by an author called Sylvia Wright, who misheard a line in an old Scottish ballad, "The Bonnie Earl of Moray”. The ballad deals with the true-life demise of James Stewart, the 2nd Earl of Moray, who was murdered in 1592 at Donibristle in Scotland, by George Gordon, the 6th Earl of Huntley. Moray seems to have quite a romantic figure, and he certainly had a great exit line. The story goes that during the murder, Huntly slashed him across the face with his sword, and that as he lay dying Moray said "Ye hae spoilt a better face than yer ain" (You have spoiled a better face than your own). To protest the killing and gather sympathy, Moray’s relatives did not have the body interred straight away but laid him out in public (on the green) for all to see. The killing was very widely condemned, a painting was made of Moray's dead body, showing his multiple wounds, with the words "God avenge my cause", and the King (James VI of Scotland, I of England), was not best pleased - although he later forgave Huntley. The song “The Bonnie Earl of Moray” tells the story as follows:

Ye highlands, and ye lowlands,
Oh where have you been?
They have slain the Earl of Moray,
And layed him on the green.
(And the King says)
Now woe be to thee, Huntly!
And wherefore did you say?
I bade you bring him wi you,
But forbade you him to slay.’’

So the poor old Earl was laid out on the green for everyone to gawp at so that Huntley would look bad and Moray would be a hero.

Back to the plot of the mondegreen - when Sylvia Wright first heard the ballad, she formed a very different picture in her mind. She thought that the song was about the Bonny Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen - a beautiful lady murdered along with her lord. I can picture her too - green velvet dress, lovely regretful face, long red hair in a braid... but she never existed. Except that she has given her name - Mondegreen - to all the figments of our imagination that are conjured up by misheard lyrics.

So -- now that we know what a mondegreen is, let’s look at some good ones.

I had a friend who enjoyed an old music hall song called, The boy I love is up in the gallery.
He used to sing the chorus as “ The boy I love is up in the gallery, The boy I love is looking down at me, There he is a’waving half his handkerchief, As merry as a robin that sings in a tree”. I think he saw the half-handkerchief as a sort of broken token, and that the other half (hopefully unused) was reposing in the pocket of the singer waiting to be matched together as the couple reunited! The actual line (bearing in mind that it is a cockney song) is “There he is a’waiving of his handkerchief” - not nearly as much fun as the half-handkerchief concept.

In The Dimming of the Day, a great song by Richard Thompson, there is a line that goes “You know just where I keep my better side”. Actually, I’m still not convinced that this is the actual line, because when you listen to Linda Thompson sing it, I swear she is singing “You know just where I keep my balustrade” - which doesn’t make any sense at all, because everyone would know where your balustrade was if you had one. In the end, I decided I liked it as “my balanced side” and I’m sticking to it!

I’m sure everyone has sung “Oh, a tree in motion” at some time, and one of my personal favourites is in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian where folks at the back of the crowd listening to Jesus think that the cheesemakers will be particularly blessed - “What’s so special about the cheesemakers??”

There’s My Body Lies Over the Ocean, (oh, bring back my body to me!!- yuck) and of course, Jimi Hendrix singing “Acting funny, but I don’t know why, scuse me while I kiss this guy” (should be “kiss the sky” - but you can take your pick)

Well, those are the mondegreens that I have been personally involved with, but there is a writer in San Francisco who has the best website for this particular form of entertainment. His name is Jon Carroll, and he writes for the San Francisco Chronicle. Once a year, he publishes all the best mondegreens that have been sent in to him over the preceding 12 months, and some of them are brilliant. The web site offers hundreds of mondegreens that will make you laugh, and here are a few examples.

Mondegreens and the people who heard them - taken from Jon Carroll’s web site:

Jay Lee Smith of Success, Mo. (thanks to the World Wide Web, the Jon Carroll column is enjoyed by readers in many states, including catatonia), says that his 4-year-old daughter sang a line of Jingle Bells as ``Bells on bobtail ring, making spareribs bright.''

Jim Maxedon of Hayward says that his 7-year-old, Brooks Maxedon, goes around the house singing, ``For he's a jolly good pharaoh.''

When Dave Morrow was a child, he sang the lovely Christmas carol ``Atomic bomb, atomic bomb . . .'' Who knew what a ``tannenbaum'' was, anyway?

Laurie Kunit swears that she heard Bob Dylan sing, "My sensitive manatee is going down the drain." This is much more fascinating than the real lyric, which is actually "my sense of humanity is going down the drain,"
Bryan Higgins heard the line from ``The Weight'' by the Band as ``He just grinned and shook my hand. `Noah's Hall,' he said.'' (Actually, ``No'' is all he said, but that's so boring.)

Milly White of Reno reminded me of one of the most familiar: ``The way I first heard the alphabet song, it was A B C D E F G H I J K alimento P. . . . I thought the alimento P was a different P from the vegetable pea, although it might be related to the pimento.''

Daniel Bernstein heard ``Mighty square faces going ticktock to love'' from ``Addicted to Love.''

Creighton Bell heard Eric Clapton's ``living on Tulsa time'' as ``living on toast and wine,'' which is Claptonesque indeed.

And finally, my personal favourite from “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, He is trampling down the village where the great giraffe is stored.'' Glory Hallelujah!!

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