Word of the Week: Mondegreen

mondegreen

\ˈmän-də-ˌgrēn\

When I was a kid, my professor parents occasionally hosted potlucks for philosophy department colleagues, staff and graduate students. This being Southern California in the 1970s, a department party involved many hairy bell-bottomed youths lounging around discussing Kierkegaard and smoking cigarettes (and other combustible substances). Someone would invariably contribute a big pot of lentil soup or a cheese-leaden casserole out of the Moosewood Cookbook (I had meant to type “cheese-laden,” but I will let it stand as is). There would be a lumpy and difficult salad involving raw carrots and too many alfalfa sprouts. One of my dad’s colleagues, a great scholar of medieval religious thought, would bring chocolate chip cookies and perhaps a pie. There would be olives and jugs of Gallo wine and by 10 PM all the food would be gone and people would end up in the kitchen scrounging for crackers and sardines and the unshelled peanuts my parents liked to snack on after dinner.

My pre-teen self would wander from room to room, eavesdropping on conversations, looking for attention, and taking in the general dissipation.

I remember being quite fond of one grad student I’ll call Laurel. I actually don’t remember her name, but I do remember admiring her because she was tall and willowy and had tawny hair she pulled back in a braid so long she could sit on the end of it. She was always quite kind to me, willing to play a hand of Crazy Eights or listen to my exhaustive disquisitions on Lord of the Rings arcana. At one party, she and I were perched on the patio wall petting the cat when another student (I’ll call him Dirk) sauntered up, drink in hand, and began to talk shop. As their conversation became increasingly animated, Dirk maneuvered himself around so that the two of them were face to face, leaving me sidelined. The cat decamped. I stubbornly hung on, determined to reclaim some share of Laurel’s notice from the snake-hipped Dirk and his fascinatingly luxuriant beard. 

Eventually he asked her about the subject of her recent paper: “Adam Stonefield Payne,” she replied.

I saw my opening: “I know about him! He was one of those Revolutionary War guys!” I offered.

“Who?” Laurel said. 

“Adam Stonefield Payne.”

“No, apparently they don’t.” 

“Sure he did! He was a hero who fought the British and went into hiding...”

“No, this was Greek.” 

“He disguised himself as an acrobat and escaped through enemy lines!” (This was, I admit, a reach, but it was the sort of thing I wished happened more in the Revolutionary War, which seemed to rely rather heavily on pamphlets for my taste.) 

Eventually Laurel unraveled the confusion at the root of my increasingly far-fetched story: the paper was not about Adam Stonefield Payne, Revolutionary War Hero and would-be acrobat. It was about Epicurus and ancient Greek metaphysics: about how “atoms don’t feel pain.”  

Chagrined, I subsided and the triumphant Dirk launched into a cascade of philosophical wonkery that drove me from the field. I went off to console myself with the kielbasa biscuits that the department secretary usually brought and ruminated on the further adventures of Colonel Payne. 

I imagined him on his perilous journey back to the Continental Army. “Ho there!” the Redcoat guards would say, “Are you a rebel colonial?” “Indeed,” he would reply, balancing on his tightrope, “I am but a simple spinner of plates!” And as the British officers gawked in amazement, Payne would eat fire, then blow it from his mouth at his would-be captors. “I am a plate-spinner FOR LIBERTY!” he would cry, vanishing into the night and leaving the officers in consternation, struggling vainly to extinguish their bell-bottomed uniforms. 

It’s only recently that I learned that there is a word for the confusion that launched my foray into revisionist history. It was a “mondegreen”—a mishearing of a word or phrase where a listener replaces one set of words with others that sound similar. Most mondegreens involve song lyrics (like the famous line from “God Bless America”: Stand beside her, and guide her/Through the night with the light from a bulb.”)

The term was coined in Harper’s in 1954 by Sylvia Wright, who describes her mother reading aloud ballads like “The Bonnie Earl o’Moray”: 

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

The Earl of Huntly and his goons may have slain the Earl of Moray/And laid him on the green, but Lady Mondegreen has proven truly immortal. Her descendants are legion, from the Bee Gees’ “Bald-Headed Woman” to Elton John’s “Close-up kind of dancer.” And, I would add, the redoubtable Adam Stonefield Payne.