Sunday, April 8, 2007

Mondegreens and eggcorns

In today's column on eggcorns, I only had space for a mention of mondegreens, those related (but different) misconstruals of poems and song lyrics.

The name mondegreen was coined by Sylvia Wright, in a 1954 Harper's magazine article where she explained her misunderstanding of an old Scottish ballad her mother used to read to her. "They hae slain the Earl Amurray / And Lady Mondegreen," Wright heard. As she pictured it:

He was lying in the 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. . . She was holding the Earl's hand.

"They" had in fact slain the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green -- but Wright refused to correct herself: "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."

I had often seen Wright credited with mondegreen, but I'd never seen the original article. Last week, however -- as Josh Glenn noted here -- Harper's put its archives online, all 157 years' worth, for the price of a subscription ($16.97 a year). So I zoomed back to 1954 and got acquainted with Wright's other mondegreens, like Good Mrs. Murphy (goodness and mercy), Pay Treats Day (that Massachusetts holiday), and the Donzerly Light of the Star-Spangled Banner.

(That same illumination, spelled "dawnzer lee light," would later puzzle Ramona, Beverly Cleary's beloved heroine, not just in English but also in French. In "Ramona la peste," the schoolchildren sing, "Oh voyez-vous, quand la lumiere de l'aube luit" ("Oh do you see, when the light of dawn shines"). But Ramona hears "l'aube luit" as the nonsense word "lobeluits," and decides -- as her English original did -- that it must be another word for "lamp.")

Popular songs, of course, have generated hundreds of mondegreens. In "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything," a line from Elton John's "Philadelphia Freedom" -- "a piece of Mama Daddy never had" (for "a peace of mind that Daddy never had")-- beats out other famous mishearings like John Fogerty's "There's a bathroom on the right" and the Beatles' "a girl with colitis goes by."

When I double-checked the lyrics at Kissthisguy.com, though, I found that the "correctors" had themselves used an eggcorn: they gave the real line not as "a peace of mind" but as "a piece of mind that Daddy never had," as if Daddy were a few bricks short of a load.

But then, mondegreens and eggcorns are sneaky little critters. There's even one on today's Ideas front, in the tease for "The Word," which makes me suspect that one of my editors was wantin' Chinese food last Friday: The column topic was wanton, but the cover line came out "Want, wonton, wont."

Posted by Jan Freeman at 02:54 PM

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