I suspect everyone has their favorite “mondegreen,” a misheard word or phrase which is usually more fun than the original. For instance, check my title against that annual journalism and literature award. The word mondegreen was coined by Sylvia Wright in a 1954 Harper’s Magazine essay. As a child, Wright had misheard a line from the old English ballad “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray,” doubling up the body count. Instead of the original:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And laid him on the green.
She heard, for the last line: “And Lady Mondegreen.” Thus “mondegreen” was born, and it’s now found in most dictionaries.
Pop and rock music have been rich sources of mondegreens, the most notorious, perhaps, coming from a 1976 hit by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. Most of us heard, “Blinded by the light, wrapped up like a douche when you’re rollin’ in the night.” What the South African singer Manfred Mann (who had a lisp) really sang was, “Blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night.” Now it gets complicated. Mann had changed Bruce Springsteen’s original lyrics, “cut loose like a deuce.” This resulted in the Boss later joking that his song took off only when it was rewritten to reference a feminine hygiene product. So, what’s this “deuce?” Muscle car enthusiasts, I’m told, consider the world’s original hot rod to be the 1932 Ford Model B with a V8 engine, nicknamed “the deuce” after the two in 1932.
Other oft-cited favorites include:
The girl with colitis (“kaleidoscope eyes”): John Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
The ants are my friends blowin’ in the wind (“The answer, my friend”): Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”
There’s a bathroom on the right (“bad moon on the rise”): Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Bad Moon Rising”
Then a man with a law degree stood by her side/And promised her he’d take her for his bride. (Sorry attorneys.) Helen Reddy and Tanya Tucker’s “Delta Dawn” was actually jilted by “a man of low degree.”
Electric boobs, her mom has two (“Electric boots and a mohair suit”): Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets”
All the lonely Starbucks lovers (“Got a long list of ex-lovers”): Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space”
Authors have taken advantage of well-known mondegreens. Vivian Walsh’s children’s book Olive, the Other Reindeer derives from “all of the other reindeer” in that awful Christmas song. Then there’s Ed McBain’s mystery novel, Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear. (If you ever sang “Keep Thou My Way” in church, you’d have warbled out, “Kept by Thy tender care, gladly the cross I’d bear.”)
Language scholar Steven Connor considers mondegreens the “wrenchings of nonsense into sense,” as our brains make assumptions when they’re otherwise stumped. That is, we hear what we want to hear. Case in point, Richard Berry’s R&B 1956 song “Louie Louie,” which was made into a hit with incoherent lyrics a few years later by The Kingsmen, and since recorded by just about everybody. Incoherent it may have been — lead singer Jack Ely was wearing braces and had to stand on tiptoe to reach the boom mic — but that didn’t stop a small army of righteous souls from hearing mondegreen-style obscenities. They were so vocal that both the FCC and the FBI investigated. Neither made a ruling, with the FCC finding the lyrics “unintelligible at any speed.” Meanwhile, a deputy prosecutor in Marion County, Indiana (prompted by the state governor, whose “ears tingled” while listening to the record) offered this flattering review: “The record is an abomination of out-of-tune guitars, an overbearing jungle rhythm and clanging cymbals. In fact, the record is an indictment of the taste of the American public. But I couldn’t say one way or another whether the lyrics are obscene.”
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com) wants to hear about your best mondegreens.
This article appears in Condors of the North Coast.