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.
