Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Greg Johnson at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Try
- Becoming Brenda Starr
- Off Beat
- Scattered
- That’s It
- So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What?
- The Spoon
- Sciatica
- Sweetheart
- A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose
- However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time
- After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices.
- As with everything in life, balance is key.
- Slow down, you move too fast…
- Yeah, I know. I have issues.
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E me at katy @ ngenius.com
The Mondegreen’s English
When thick brogues are an essential element of a wee little first-generation American’s upbringing, it’s not easy to avoid poor Lady Mondegreen.
Never heard of the chick, you say? Never heard of Sylvia Wright, either? Well, neither had I until this morning, when I read my friend Robin Lee Hatcher’s blog post. Now I can’t stop laughing—-and remembering.
Sylvia Wright coined the term mondegreen in an essay “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” which was published in Harper’s Magazine in November 1954. She described how, as a young girl, she misheard the final line of the first stanza from the 17th century ballad “The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray.” She made up a last line that made perfect sense to her, though, and recited it with gusto and grief, I’m sure.
I’m betting her mother, who read the Scottish ballad aloud to Sylvia, was from Scotland. How else would the words “laid him on the green” sound like “Lady Mondegreen”?
That’s the deal with those Scots. They get their vowel sounds twisted all to heck and back. An innocent child comes home from first grade with a simple list of three-letter spelling words to learn and her dad can make them sound like words no one else in the class knows. Or wants to know.
And then he’ll criticize the teachers for not educating his child in “the King’s English.” And sometimes, while he’s criticizing, the child picks up a few vocabulary words that shouldn’t be repeated either with or without the brogue.
Little Sylvia Wright was one of the lucky ones. She finally recovered from grieving over Lady Mondegreen and went on to achieve linguistic history. Now the word mondegreen has made it into the dictionary. It means “a word or phrase resulting from a misinterpretation of a word or phrase that has been heard.”
Of course, this isn’t all about being raised by brogues. Americans of long standing get tripped up, too. And the results are stunning.
So, you mean Elton John wasn’t really singing “Hold me closer, Tony Danza,” like Phoebe on Friends thought he was? So many dreams shattered!
My kids pulled a million of these, and I’ve written many of them down—-somewhere. Carrie sang, “Land where my fathers died, land where the children cried…”
There was a worship song back in the day that went, “It’s beginning to rain, rain, rain. Hear the voice of the Father.” Carrie must have heard that we had serious roof problems because her version went, “It’s beginning to rain, rain, rain, on the house of the father.” She had a haunting lament she applied to these songs, rather Sylvia Wrightlike in its grief.
Perhaps my father, before he died, had whispered “The Bonnie Earl O’Moray” into her infant ear. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Any twisted up words in your mind? Or in your children’s? Give me your best mondegreen. Do it for Tony Danza.
- Don't we need audio for this Katy? Shor and begorra, Katy mi gurl or something like that.
Posted by Sandi Thompson on 09/09/08 at 09:11 AM
- I can't pick one mondegreen -- I'm always mixing up sentences or mispronouncing words. Of course, it rarely happens when I write, but the second words flow from my mouth, they twist and writhe every which way. Sigh. Prayfully God never calls me to be a speaker.
Posted by Gracie on 09/10/08 at 09:55 PM
- Jackson is learning Irish in school. His first day it was Slán agat, goodbye, which apparently to sounds like "so long." So that works. When Jessica was very little, they were doing a musical in church with the words, "Some people call him the son of God, some people call him a fraud." Why, she asked me, do people call Jesus a frog?
Posted by alison on 09/15/08 at 10:02 AM
- Dylan, at a funeral, very loudly sang (when he was about 3)..."A tisket, a tasket, who's in Santa's casket." Not EXACTLY what you were talking about, but still so cute.
Posted by Bridget on 09/17/08 at 04:06 PM
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