Uncanny Tales – (087) The Lady Mondergreen

 

Everything nowadays has a name every illness, every condition has a pigeonhole, every hobby or pastime, every job and occupation and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, after all that is one of the functions of language.

Names and definitions enable us to know what someone else is talking about as well as feeding the habit of those interested in trivia.

I like trivia myself all those interesting facts about just about anything, the origins of surnames, inventors, adventurers, sporting events, who did what to who and when.

In fact, my head is absolutely full of useless bits of trivia from irrelevant facts to complete rubbish I even know the origin of the word trivia.

All of which brings us neatly to the purpose of my rambling, namely that all of us at one time or another have listened to a song and got it wrong and completely misheard the lyric, sometimes just the first hearing and sometimes every time you hear it.

I’m sure that everyone has a list of their own that they can recite but one that always sticks in my mind is from the Queen classic “Bohemian Rhapsody” the correct line is “spare him his life from this monstrosity” but I always hear “spare him his life from his Walls sausages”, I know it makes no sense but that’s what I hear.

I once heard Billy Connolly telling one of his tales many years ago, which happened when he was working in America, it was about a little girl in church who instead of singing “Gladly the cross I bare” sang “Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear”.

Now I’m sure that you all have far better examples than the two that I have mentioned.

All this leads me neatly to the point where I impart my little piece of boring trivia, a little gem of trivia which just happens to be the name to describe a misheard lyric, that word being ‘Mondergreen’.

The word “Mondergreen” is derived from an old folk song that was released on a record in the early 1950’s which contained the line “They laid him on the green” but this was misheard and was thus misinterpreted as “The Lady Mondergreen.”

Now wasn’t that an interesting bit of rubbish.

 

I would be interested to hear your own examples of Mondergreens.