SDG here. Both Jimmy and I have posted in the past about mondegreens, so I won't go into the background about why misheard song lyrics and the like are called that (more at Wikipedia)… but I will tell you why I've been thinking about them lately.
Last week, I had a mondedream.
Here's what happened. Last weekend, while browsing in a bookstore, I heard the song "Run-Around" by the band Blues Traveler, a song I've heard many times before. Like many people (as I've since learned), I've never known exactly how the chorus begins — and, not being big into popular music generally, I've never thought much about it before.
I didn't think of it that evening either, although subconsciously I must have been working on it, because that night I dreamed about the song — and, in my dream, thought I was positive I had figured out the ambiguous line in question.
When I woke up, I realized that my guess had to be wrong — but I also realized that that it was actually phonetically persuasive and narratively cogent — more so, in fact, than other mondegreens on the same line I've since found online.
The real line, I have since found out, is:
"But you / Why you wanna give me the runaround?"
However, that "But-a ya-e-ew…" is polysyllablized (I'm sure there's a musicological term for this) in such a way that many people apparently think it is something more complicated. In fact, I didn't know this at the time, but it turns out that one common mondegreen for this line is "Buddy L…" Makes no sense, but that's what people think he's saying.
I like my dreamed-up version better:
"Bloody hell… why you wanna give me the runaround?"
"Bloody hell" sounds a lot like "Buddy L" (and therefore both must sound a lot like the way the line actually comes out) — but my version actually makes sense… and I came up with it in my sleep.
What's more, I keep singing it that way in my head now — even though I now know the real line.
Now that I'm on the subject, I might as well reveal my lifetime classic mondegreen.
Fair warning: This anecdote will ruin several minutes of Handel's Messiah for you. There. You can't say I didn't tell you. (As added protection, I'll white out the words so you have to swipe them with your mouse to read them.)
The Messiah got a lot of play in our house when I was a kid. My mother sang in it at a local church, and she played it especially around Christmastime. My mondegreen concerns the opening of the segment that begins:
"All we like sheep … All we like sheep / Have gone astray…"
In typical Baroque style, those first four words "All we like sheep" are echoed by four antiphonal beats from the strings section: "All we like sheep [bum bum bum bum]."
As a child, I not only misheard the words "All we like sheep," I glossed an antiphonal response onto the four following beats which, in my brain at the time, seemed somehow fitting.
So during "All we like sheep [bum bum bum bum]," what I heard in my head as a kid was (swipe with your mouse at your own risk!):
"Oh, we like sheep! [And sheep like us!]"
People hate me for telling them that, because it ruins the segment. (Sorry people!)
So those are my mondegreens. (I've got others, but I'll save 'em for later.) In the combox, feel free to share yours! I don't mean your favorite common ones, like "There's a bathroom on the right" or "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" (though you can add those too), but song lyrics you yourself misheard or misinterpreted.
In closing, a seasonal favorite (not mine!): "Now bring us some frigging pudding!" (Real line: "Now bring us some figgy pudding," "We Wish You a Merry Christmas")
My fav. mondegreen memory was a teenage friend singing Clouds. The correct lyrics are
“And now my friends are acting strange. They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed.”
Hers: “They shave their heads, they say I’ve changed.”
My aunt suggested a slight adjustment, “And now my friends are acting strange. They shave their heads, they dress in chains.” And now I can’t hear the song without recalling those new lyrics and snickering.
This isn’t a Mondegreen but similar. When my daughter was quite young we had an Irish priest with a lovely brogue. My daughter turned to me once during Mass and asked “Mom, why do we pray to cheeses?” I was confused, then heard Father say “Jesus” and it sounded exactly like “cheeses”. I have no idea how long she had been thinking that before she asked. We laugh about it now, but at the time I was horrified.
In Michael W. Smith’s “Agnus Dei” from “Go West Young Man”…
The words go “Worthy is the Lamb/ Worthy is the Lamb/ You are Holy, Holy/ are you Lord God almighty”
But my sister and I, when we were young, thought it was, “Twenty is enough/ Twenty is enough/ you’re on my team, my team./ Are you Lord God almighty?”
I have no idea why.
My most recent was a song my 16 play about a boy who cheats on a the girl singing the song so she “dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped up four-wheel drive…
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights..
I thought the words were:Can’t for the life of me remember what I thought the Louisville slugger part was now that I know the real line…
But I was expounding to my daughter and her friends that the line “bold hair lies” was probably supposed to be “bald hair lies” blah blah blah.
After a polite and pregnant silence my daughter informed be that the line was:
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights..
oops!
Quick … who’s going to add “Mondedream” to wikipedia?
Dear SDG,
You wrote:
However, that “But-a ya-e-ew…” is polysyllablized (I’m sure there’s a musicological term for this)
None of which I am aware, although there is a linguistic term: stretched speech.
The Chicken
(snort!)
Good to hear from you, Smoky. 🙂
How disappointingly prosaic. Really?
Chicken, I seem to recall you have an advanced degree (a doctorate?) in musicology, no? You’re saying there isn’t a musicological term for a syllable stretched out over more than one beat of music (like “Glo – o – o – ria in excelsis Deo,” etc.)? Well, perhaps not, then … but there jolly well should be.
This isn’t a mondegreen. But it does spoil a song. My husband made this up while I was trying to get my kids to sing advent songs around a lit advent wreath:
On Jordan’s Bank the Baptist cried,
It’s much too cold to go outside.
The Lord Himself would I am sure
Stay Jewish at this temperature.
(He said “stay Pagan” but I pointed out that He never was that. Of course He always was Jewish in His human nature, and the baptism of John didn’t make one a Christian….but that is going too far into rationality for this sort of thing.)
Susan Peterson
SDG,
I do not know if the term applies to what the original question
‘However, that “But-a ya-e-ew…” is polysyllablized (I’m sure there’s a musicological term for this’
but the term for what you describe in ‘Angles We Have Heard on High’,
‘You’re saying there isn’t a musicological term for a syllable stretched out over more than one beat of music (like “Glo – o – o – ria in excelsis Deo,” etc.)? Well, perhaps not, then … but there jolly well should be.’.gr
is melisma.
Coincidentally I first came across this term while researching the song ‘For Unto Us a Child is Born,’ (also from Handel’s Messiah) several weeks ago.
I don’t know if this counts, but a bazillion years ago (or so it feels), I was an 8th grader (class of ’73) who was part of a guitar choir at my parish. We always sang the Our Father, and were constantly reminded to watch our enunciation so we didn’t sing “Lead a snot into temptation…”
There is a musical term for a syllable stretched out over more than one note in music. Actually there are two.
A melisma is a song setting in which one syllable gets more than one note, usually more than six.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melisma
Less than six is usually considered a neumatic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neumatic
Dear Greg and Nancy,
You are correct, but only with regards to the musical content (the sound part). It was my understanding that SDG was asking about the speech component, not the musical component. I have not heard the song, by the way, so I can’t exactly tell what is changed (Greg and Nancy might have a better handle on it than I, if they have heard the song). If SDG meant the musical extension, then you are correct, but melisma was the extending of a melody for many notes (as opposed to nuemisma, as Greg noted) on a single syllable, not the stretching of the syllable, itself. I was going on SGD’s attempted mimicking the phenomenon in his written text. I am not a vocalist and I am disregarding twentieth-century techniques (this does occur there, although I don’t know of an official name).
So, if SDG meant an extension of the music on a single syllable, then melisma, it is. If he meant extension of the speech, then there is no real term. If you meant a combination of both , then we could, I suppose one could call it semi-melismatic, and such a thing might have a name in non-Western music of which I am not aware.
The Chicken
May last post should be Greg and Ryan, of course (sorry, Nancy).
The Chicken
When we were younger, my sister was convinced that the line “In excelsis Deo!” in the Christmas carol “Angels We Have Heard on High” was “In Jesse’s name-o!”
As a tiny girl I thought “Angels we have heard on high” was “eggshells we have heard on high” and “In Excelcis Deo” was “In eggshells sings Deo”.
As a kindergartner i was in an assembly where we sang Christmas carols, more than I could keep straight, and the words were mostly new to me. All I remember is thinking of the images the mondegreens put in my head and then telling my mother that we sang one where Lucy ran under the bridge. She knew which one I meant. I can’t seem to figure out what song it was now.
I have to say, having sung in choirs for a couple decades, that I can no longer really remember such mental substitutions in songs. This is largely because (usually during “alto practice”) several of us in the T&B ranges would make up improvise new words for hymns (when we weren’t singing along with the altos sotto voce), especially those that we particularly didn’t like.
The Baptist ecclesial assembly I grew up in had a rich music program with huge pageants at Christmas and Easter. One of my favorite misheard lyrics was during the Easter pageant when the choir sang a chorus called “He’s Alive.” The child of one of the choir members was later overheard singing “He’s a lie.”
I won’t detail my own mis-hearing of the lyrics of Blinded By The Light by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band…I think we’ve all been there.
Of course you’re talking about the second line of the chorus… but my sister may be the only person who misheard the first line of the chorus, and the title of the song, as “By Day, By the Night.”
In the German refrain of Silent Night, my kids and I always laugh because we sing “steal the eggnog…hide the eggnog.”
When I was a kid, I misheard “When the Saints Go Marching In” as “When the SNAKES Go Marching In”.
This is like a symphony of mondegreens:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLd22ha_-VU
I learned the term “mondegreen” in late 2007. One thing led to another, and now I’m the administrator of a flaky effort called MANDY GREEN Project largely aimed at helping establish “mondegreen” as a household word. It involves a quirky novel written by MANDY GREEN (yep, “mondegreen” misheard as “Mandy Green”) whose story centers on a mondegreen (“Gesundheit Whistle” misheard as “Gazoon High Twizzle”). Please check it out, especially if your name happens to be MANDY GREEN.
My son told me the whole effort is hopeless, adding that he hated to be the BEAR OF BAD NEWS.
The all tame favorite, now passed into legend, is from a Protestant hymn and is self-explanatory;
“Gladly the cross-eyed bear…”
My worst was always:
“Devil with a bluegrass song…” vs. “Devil with a blue dress on…”
If you’ve ever watched “Shrek the Halls” the hallelujah chorus of Handel’s “Messiah” interpreted as “Waffle Santa!” instead of “Hallelujah!”A bad mondegreen, but it works and will have you laughing the next time you hear it.
I always heard that Blues Traveller song as “Buddy-o” rather than “But you.”
When I was in high school, I listened to a lot of Deep Forest. One day my boss told me about the words he and his wife made up to substitute for the (non-English) words on the Boheme album. I’ve never been able to hear those songs the same way since, and you wouldn’t believe the temptation to make up words for the other albums.
My Dad was a huge Simon and Garfunkle fan and when I started listening to them myself I misheard some lyrics from ‘The Boxer’. Instead of ‘Just a comeon from the whores on seventh avenue’, I heard ‘Just to come home from the wars on seventh avenue.’
“Christ has dimes, Christ has ribbons, Christ will come again” is my grandnephew’s interpretation of the Mystery of Faith…
This is not a mondegreen because it was on purpose, but ever since seeing Cartman’s (from South Park) performance of O Holy Night, I can’t sing that song without singing “Jesus was born and so I get presents / Thank you, Jesus, for being born.”
SDG, that All We Like Sheep mondegreen might have ruined the chorus for me except I had a college roommate who heard exactly the same thing >:[.
And she didn’t have the ears of childhood as an excuse.
When I was growing up, my family attended Mass in Latin. Because of this when I was a kid, I just assumed that any song lyrics I didn’t understand were simply in Latin.
I was shocked to learn as a teenager that the whole Messaiah and the banana boat song (Day-Oh!) were in fact completely in English.
I’ll never forgive you for ruining my favorite song in Handel’s Messiah. I always thought they we singing, “Oh! We like cheese”. My whole family will be crushed.
My best friend in junior high school once confessed she heard the words “born between two lovers” instead of “torn between two lovers” in a 70’s song the name of which escapes me now.
And I can never see Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado without remembering my husband’s story of a Baylor University student production in the 80’s. Katisha, an ugly old woman about to be thwarted in her plans to marry the son of the Mikado (emperor), is upstaging the Mikado and singing “Bow, Bow, to his daughter-in-law elect,” and the chorus of townspeople echo her and bow. But jokesters in the chorus enjoyed singing, “Bow wow to his daughter-in-law elect!” as a comment on her appearance.
I can never quite hear it sung properly anymore, in memory, while listening to a recording or watching a DVD, or when seeing it live. Dang, now the song is stuck in my head. Oh, no, Gilbert and Sullivan tunes will haunt me all day now. Yikes, aprrenticed to a Pirate!
What’s the word for getting a song stuck in your head?
“What’s the word for getting a song stuck in your head?”
That would be an “ear worm”.
Better Than Ezra, being from Louisiana, and therefore elocutionally-challenged, are full of them. The best one, one that might in fact have made an interesting song on a completely different subject, comes from their first album (“Deluxe”) and the song: “Cry in the Sun”. Knowing the song’s title, I could not have made this mishearing, but my wife, being also an English major, heard: “Cry Emerson”. Ah, thought my wife, a song about 19th century transcendalists, how very literate of BTE!
Another one from BTE is from their song “Rosealia” (same, first, best album: “Deluxe”), a rather serious song about spousal abuse, wherein there is line: “Jealousy… can turn a hand into a fist”, which I always heard as “Jealousy… can turn a hand into a face”, which of course doesn’t make a whole lotta sense. But, Kevin Griffins highly stylized elocution makes it sound that way.
erm, that should “transcendentalists”… how very illiterate of me…
I still laugh at my husband’s conviction that it wasn’t the “lyrical gangsta” but the “leprechaun gangsta” in Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes The Hotstepper” rap.