FanStory.com - Misunderstandings & Mondegreensby Jim Wile

I was playing golf with my 80-year-old widower dad one day. We had just played the 3rd hole and were hurrying to catch up with a single golfer ahead of us—an elderly woman my dad was interested in meeting. He was hoping maybe she’d invite us to join her for the rest of the nine.

She had just hit her tee shot on the short par-3 4th hole with a pond in front, and she was about to leave. As we approached her, Dad said, “I’m just in time. How do you do?”

The woman looked at Dad for a moment and said, “Nice to meet you, Justin. I’m in the pond.”

“Nice to meet you too, Mindy,” said Dad.

The woman said, “My name is Martha, not Mindy.”

“Well, my name is Frank, not Justin.”

We all just stared at each other for a few seconds, and I tried to puzzle out how this conversation went so wrong so quickly. I guess it’s one of the afflictions of getting old; neither of them could hear very well.

“Let’s try to interpret what just happened here,” I said. “When we walked up to the tee, you had just teed off, Martha, and Dad said, ‘I’m just in time,’ meaning we were just in time to catch up to you as we were hoping to join you. However, you thought he was introducing himself as Justin Time. Then when he said, ‘How do you do?’ I think you mistook it for ‘How’d you do?’ so you told him you hit it in the pond. Now, Dad misheard you and thought you said, ‘I’m Mindy Pond.’ I think you both have been bitten by that old bugger, mondegreen.”

“Who is Monty Green?” they both asked together.

“Hmm, it gotcha again. It isn’t a who; it’s a what. The word is mondegreen. It’s when you hear something and misinterpret it as something else that sounds close. Did you ever see the movie The Santa Clause in which Tim Allen takes on the role of Santa Claus? He and his son discover a ladder leading up to the roof of his house, and the kid starts to climb it. Then he notices a sign on the ladder that says ‘Rose Suchak Ladder Company,’ and he says, ‘It’s just like the poem, Dad. Out by the roof there’s a Rose Suchak Ladder.’” That was a mondegreen.

“That’s a strange name—mondegreen. Where do you suppose it came from?” asked Dad.

“The American writer, Sylvia Wright, made up the term in 1954. She had remembered her mother reading the Scottish poem ‘The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray’ and misinterpreting the words ‘laid him on the green’ as ‘Lady Mondegreen.’ They tend to occur mostly in songs, as when Jimi Hendrix sang that he was about to ‘kiss this guy’ when what he was really singing was ‘kiss the sky.’

“’The Star-Spangled Banner’ has two mondegreens in the first line. Remember the old joke about the Mexican fellow watching the baseball game from the top of the flagpole and thinking everyone was so polite by singing to him, ‘Jose, can you see?’ Then it follows with ‘by the donzerly light.’ Kids have been asking for years what a donzerly light is. Do you remember the old Neil Diamond song, ‘Forever in blue jeans?’ How many people misheard it as ‘for Reverend Blue Jeans?’ And the song ‘Louie Louie’ from the 60s? People heard all kinds of bad words that weren’t there in that one.

“Mondegreens are the source of many double-entendres too. Beware if you’re a woman named Kay, because you’re very likely to hear at some point, ‘If you see Kay.’ Also, I think it was in the movie Porky’s when some smartass called the soda shop and asked if Mike Hunt was there, and the girl behind the counter, who answered the phone, hollered out, ‘Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?’ Sorry if that offended you, Martha, but I’m just relating what was in the movie.”

She cracked up and waved me off.

“Then there’s the reverse mondegreen in which you start with nonsense words but can interpret them correctly, as in the song ‘Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey.’

“So, you guys don’t have to feel too bad about messing up each other’s names. You’re in good company.”

Martha watched both of us hit our shots onto the green. She said, “Gosh, I wish I could say, ‘I’m mondegreen’ instead of ‘I’m mindepond’.”