Some Mondegreens

When, In a Canterbury bar many years ago, I ordered a cider, the East Kent cockney bartender responded with a question that I interpreted as "strong Boer what knees?" Why would he ask me about the joints of a South African farmer? I was absolutely befuddled even when he repeated the question several times. Finally, in frustration, he held up two bottles of cider: the first was labeled "Strongbow" and the second "Watney's." He was simply asking me if I preferred Strongbow or Watney's -- but how was I to know?  Some years afterward I mentioned this incident to an English friend who countered with a story of her own. On her first visit to New York City, she said, she ordered a sandwich and the counterman asked her "fur rear oughta go?"

I recalled these events while musing on two moments of childhood linguistic extremity. The first was when I asked one of my P. S. 217 friends what they did during Religious Instruction (in the 1950s, Roman Catholic kids were released from class for two hours a week to study at the local parish church, which in my neighborhood was St. Rose of Lima -- popularly known as "Roe Salima."  Our teachers took the opportunity to catch up on the local newspapers while students twiddled the collective thumb). My friend's answer, "Cat kiss 'em." It was many years before I understood that the word I had no hope of understanding was "catechism." I was even more puzzled when a Jewish student, who could not know that I came from a family that regularly celebrated Yom Kippur with a roast pork dinner, asked me, "do you put on to fill in?" I construed the question to be some sort of insult, but after a decade or so I realized that I had been asked something rather serious: "Do you put on tefillin? -- tefillin being small leather boxes containing biblical verses donned by observant Jews during morning prayers.

In my neighborhood, it was common for people to shout "doozie pots" at each other.  I had no idea what that expression meant, except for a strong feeling that it wasn't praise. It was not until I studied a little Italian that I understood that what I heard as "doozie pots" was a Sicilian variant of tu sei pazzo, "you're crazy."

None of these misunderstandings, strictly speaking, meet the mondegreen threshold;  let's call them near-mondegreens. (The best-known mondegreen is "I led the pigeons to the flag" -- a mishearing of "I pledge allegiance to the flag." The word mondegreen derives from one of the Child ballads: "They hae slain the Earl of Murray/ And laid him on the green," the second of these lines misheard as "And Lady Mondegreen"). In my long list of personal mondegreens, the two that are most vivid in my memory are connected to my incomprehension of religion.  They are a) the luscious "round young virgin" of Silent Night, and b) the theologically implausible "The Lord is ice, the Lord is made of ice" in one of the choruses of The Messiah ("even so in Christ, shall we be made alive"). Here's another mondegreen from my childhood:  "Who knows what evil lurks in the hot cement?" March 12:  Last night at dinner, I remarked  that one of my favorite innovations of the second half of the twentieth century was "fitted sheets."  A guest said, "You're right;  we didn't used to have feta cheese." 

Comments

[Don Block]

Don't forget "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear."

[SD]

My own tame mondegreens were common ones: "for all intensive purposes" and "spitting image." My mother in her accented English had a few, including "Only go scrozzastreet at the stop light."

But one of my high school English teachers at Erasmus, Mrs. Julia Ashley, told us a dyslexically funny one, purportedly from personal experience grading papers: "The equator is a menagerie lion running around the earth." And since we had linguistic as well as bodily extremities on our collective teenage minds, one of the class wits came up privately with this not-quite but passable one: "The veterinarian circumcised the cat around the room." Ouch, yipes, and yipes again!

[Axel Sprengtporten]

I lived for a year in Iowa City, Iowa. I remember a friend's young son who was looking forward to a day-trip to "see da rabbits."