“I watched you suffer, a dalek in pain . . .”
When I heard Mick Jagger drawl those words in the Rolling Stones version of Wild Horses, I was momentarily jolted by the Doctor Who reference. A dalek in pain would not be a nice thing to witness, I imagined. Then reality intervened and I realised the words I’d mis-heard were “a dull aching pain”. Which made more sense but was far less picturesque. I had, of course, experienced a mondegreen.
Just in case you are one of the few people in the English-speaking world who doesn’t know what a mondegreen is, I’ll quickly mention that the word was invented by American writer Sylvia Wright, whose mother apparently used to read aloud a Scottish poem, The Bonny Earl of Murray. Instead of hearing: “They have slain the Earl of Murray, and laid him on the green”, young Sylvia heard that somebody had killed both the earl “and Lady Mondegreen”. The non-existent dead lady’s name became famous in time, and now the word is firmly entrenched in the English vocabulary.
I experienced my first mondegreen when I was in kindergarten. There was a song we used to sing about a trotting pony, and as I cheerfully sang the words: “Where is smooth Ann? Where is Tony?” I began to ponder the whereabouts of the missing pair. Eventually I realised the words were actually supposed to be: “Where it’s smooth and where it’s stony” a rendition that finally made sense of what had been a truly nonsensical ditty.
The next one I remember was another childhood song which revolved, as I thought, around a nuisance insect known as a “shoe-fly”. As in: “Shoe-fly don’t bother me”. Possibly I was aware of horse flies, March flies, blow flies and dragonflies and imagined this creature to be a flying pest that insisted on infesting footwear – although I also vaguely recollect trying to picture a fly that was somewhat shoe-shaped. Ultimately, of course, I realised the song was about shoo-ing a fly, which made more sense but was less interesting.
My attempt to invent a mondegreen had me sacked from my primary school choir. (Although, given my voice, perhaps it was just a convenient excuse lit upon by choir leader Mrs Baldwin to rid the angelic child chorus of a discordant note?). The song was about Christoper Robin saying his prayers, and it had the line: “Hush, hush, whisper who dares?” – meaning it’s so quiet who would dare break the spell with even a whisper. I however, wished to be clever, so chose to hear the words as an instruction to literally intone the words “Who dares” in the loudest stage whisper I could muster. This, along with my attempts to explain the joke to my neighbours in the choir led to my summary and permanent ejection.
Practically everybody has a mondegreen story of some sort to tell. I knew a bloke, for example, who thought the song Cry Me a River was about a waterway in the Crimea. If there’s a world mondegreen society I’d suggest they give a prize to James Reyne, who used to sing in the band Australian Crawl. His voice always sounded great, but some of his lyrics could be a bit hard for me to decipher. When he sang “Oh no, not you again” it sounded to me like “Banana chewy gum”. I had a friend who used to play the Nirvana song Smells Like Teen Spirit over and over while we worked on a building job, installing doors and windows. It’s a song that is justifiably famous for its weird lyrics, heard or misheard. Try as I might, the clearest words I could hear were definitely “I’m a wino, it’s contagious”. Except that they were really “Here we are now, entertain us”.
The internet is alive with mondegreen websites, and if you’ve got half an hour to kill they are a lot of fun to browse.
Some of the examples listed are so outrageous that you won’t believe anybody could have misheard the words so completely, but others are so plausible you might prefer them to the real thing. I felt that way when I imagined Bob Dylan mouthing a nasal account of the regrettable effect of a mild cyclone on a colony of social insects. Picture this: “the ants are my friend, they’re blowin’ in the wind“. Nor will Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds ever be the same now that I’ve trained myself to hear the Beatles musing on digestive tract ailments as they solemnly describe watching “the girl with colitis go by”.
Technically, mondegreens are supposed to be misheard lyrics or stanzas from popular songs or poems, but there are lesser breeds that occur in daily conversation – for those of us whose hearing or attention spans are not so great, at least. Once, for example, I thought I heard some people talking about “grape hour” which I supposed was happy hour at a wine bar, until the context of the discussion forced me to reinterpret the expression as “grey power”. And when I thought I heard a lawyer saying his client was going to “sue Denise”, it took me a while to figure out that his client was really “Sudanese”. Once, in a restaurant with my wife and kids, I thought the Aussie waitress asked us: “Do you wanna water?” We said yes, some water would be nice. Except what she really meant was: “Do you want to order?” Well yes, OK, we’ll order when you bring the water.
But back to songs. By now, there have been scores of surveys to name the most mondegreen-prone songs in the English language. Jimi Hendrix is generally acknowledged to top the polls with a line from Purple Haze, often misheard as “Scuse me while I kiss this guy” instead of the intended “kiss the sky”. As a matter of fact there is an actual website called KissThisGuy.com, devoted to misheard lyrics.
Got some mondegereens of your own to share?
Al Stewart has a song “Soho (Needless To Say” in which there’s the line
“The sun goes down on a neon eon though you’d have a job explaining it to Richard Coeur de Lion”
Richard Couer de Lion being Richard the Lionheart, king of England.
Because the song was released in 1973, for a long time I thought Al was singing “Richard, Kurt, or Leon”, a reference to Richard Nixon, Kurt Waldheim, and Leonid Brezhnev – the leaders of the US, UN, and USSR in that year.