Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > The Lighter Side
Malapropisms, mondegreens, eggcorns, spoonerisms and others!
southendmd:
Mondegreen
In a 1954 essay in Harper's Magazine, Sylvia Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the last line of the first stanza from the seventeenth-century ballad "The Bonnie 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 correct 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.
~~~~~
A mondegreen is a word or phrase that results when on misinterprets a line that is spoken or sung. A simple mondegreen is very much like an eggcorn, as when one hears "very close veins" instead of "varicose veins".
Many popular mondegreens come from song lyrics, such as "there's the bathroom on the right" instead of "there's a bad moon on the rise" in the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit Bad Moon Rising, or "the cross-eyed bear" in place of "the cross I bear" in Alanis Morissette's You Oughta Know.
Examples:
"The girl with colitis goes by" (from a lyric in the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds": "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes")
That famous BeeGees song: "Bald-headed Woman" ("More Than a Woman")
That famous Neil Diamond song: "The Reverend Blue Jeans" ("Forever in Blue Jeans")
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: southendmd on November 02, 2022, 04:06:56 pm ---[Marjorie Taylor Greene uses malapropisms in both communications directed at her base as well as when she communicates with the rest of the world, including references to: "peach tree dish" (petri dish), "gazpacho police," (gestapo), and "fragrantly violated..." (flagrantly), among others.
--- End quote ---
Well, she is from Georgia. ...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: southendmd on November 02, 2022, 04:24:36 pm ---"The girl with colitis goes by" (from a lyric in the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds": "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes")
--- End quote ---
She's probably on her way to the bathroom on the right. ...
southendmd:
"Just let me staple the vicar."
southendmd:
A reverse mondegreen is the intentional production, in speech or writing, of words or phrases that seem to be gibberish but disguise meaning. A prominent example is Mairzy Doats, a 1943 novelty song by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman, and Jerry Livingston. The lyrics are a reverse mondegreen, made up of same-sounding words or phrases (sometimes also referred to as "oronyms"), so pronounced (and written) as to challenge the listener (or reader) to interpret them:
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?
The clue to the meaning is contained in the bridge of the song:
If the words sound queer and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey,
Sing "Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy."
This makes it clear that the last line is "A kid'll eat ivy, too; wouldn't you?"
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