Meet "Mondegreen"

"Mondegreen" is a word that lends itself to many different interpretations - it could very easily serve as the name for a heavy metal band, or a new type of ecologically-focused rock music - but it refers to one of my lifelong sources of frustration. It is analogous to W.C. Fields' famous malapropisms - like "I resemble that remark" - as well as other verbal faux pas, like "interrogation" for "integration", or numerous other examples you hear mangling English every day. The term stems from an old Scottish ballad which contains the lyric: "laid him on the green" - BUT - to many listeners, it sounds like: "Lady Mon - dee - Green", apparently evoking an obscure but titled aristocrat. The word has been added to the latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, a sign that it has finally "arrived."as an official word.


Musical mondegreens are numerous, perhaps owing to the way lyrics are usually mumbled, muffled or screamed and loaded with incomprehensible slang, rendering them almost unintelligible to begin with. For example, one of my own personal mondegreens stems from my own daughter. She grew up listening to the occasional reggae tune, one of them being "Rivers of Babylon" by the Melodians, from the soundtrack of the ground-breaking reggae epic "The Harder They Come." The chorus goes: "By the rivers of Babylon...", but my daughter substituted the word "polliwogs" for Babylon, singing along with the Melodians by warbling: "By the river of polliwogs."


There are some very well known mondegreens sprinkled throughout some of the most popular rock anthems. Those of us who grew up with Creedence Clearwater and Jimi Hendrix in the Sixties may have really thought that John Fogarty was singing: "There's a bathroom on the right" rather than "There's a bad moon on the rise" , or that Hendrix really said: "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" in place of "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky."


Even when I had to learn lyrics during my extremely forgettable stint singing with a rock band for a couple of months, I struggled with deciphering Robert Plant, trying to figure out which squeals equated to which words, or Paul Butterfield's "Born in Chicago", where one of the lines always sounded like: "Best thing I can say about that boy/He got laid". I still don't know the right word. Maybe that's why I like Wilson Pickett and Chuck Berry - their verses are pretty straightforward and comprehensible.


I'm sure you've got your own personal mondegreens. Feel free to submit them and I'll compile a more extensive list for a future blog.