Something To Keep You Going

The painting is done but it’s taking as long to move in my stuff, arrange my books and pictures and so on as it took to decorate.  By way of apology for my continued absence, here’s a repost that I thought you might enjoy.

My First Mondegreen

A mondegreen is a mishearing of a phrase.  It was so named by Sylvia Wright, who misheard a line in a poem.  From Wikipedia:

In the essay, Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the last line of the first stanza from the 17th-century ballad “The Bonny Earl O’Moray“. She wrote:

 When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from “Percy’s Reliques“, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

 

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O’ Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen. 

 The actual fourth line is “And laid him on the green”. Wright explained the need for a new term:

The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.

 

Other examples Wright suggested are:

• Surely Good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life (“Surely goodness and mercy…” from Psalm 23)
• The wild, strange battle cry “Haffely, Gaffely, Gaffely, Gonward.” (“Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward,” from “The Charge of the Light Brigade“)

I experienced my first mondegreen as a child, courtesy of Kenny Rogers’ song, Lucille:

You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille,
With four hundred children and a crop in the field.

I thought, ‘Four hundred children?  No wonder she left him.’  The line is actually,With four hungry children.

My second mondegreen came from the carol, Good King Wenceslas:

Good King Wensess last had gout

*

Here are a few more you might find amusing:

• From: I’ve Had the Time of My Life – Now I’ve had a time with your wife
• From: Ticket To Ride – She’s got a chicken to fry
• From: Abracadabra – Abra Abra Cadabra… I wanna freak out and stab ya
• From: The Christmas Song – Jeff’s nuts roasting on an open fire, check for snipping at your nose
• From God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen – Get dressed ye married gentlemen, let nothing through this May

You’ll find more here http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/humor/mondegreens.asp and here http://www.kissthisguy.com/

*

How about you?  Have you got any mondegreens to share?