Tag Archives: mondegreens

Fun With Typos and Other Mistakes

etc., , ,

When I was editing magazines, the thing we feared most was typos. I know that autocorrect has introduced as many typos as it has autocorrected (It’s never duck!). But back then, any typo was on us. (I was the proofreader as well as an editor, so usually it was on me. But I digress.)

Since it was also an educational magazine, the typo we feared most was in the words “Public School.” Losing that first L would have been the kiss of death. We were successful in keeping it in the right place. (Once I caught a bilingual mistake made by our senior editor, a lady we all suspected was at least 110. She used to send in manuscripts on scraps of paper and toilet paper rolls. I got to say to her sweetly, “Oh, you do want it to say ‘Mi casa is su casa.’” But I digress again.)

Another kind of word boo-boo involves the sense of hearing. It’s called a “mondegreen” (which I’ll explain if you ask me to, but this post is long enough already) and occurs in the context of misheard song lyrics. The most famous is probably either “There’s a bathroom on the right“ or “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy,” though I’m partial to “I can see all the popsicles in my way.”

(Once I thought I heard “Jack of Orkin” in a song and took it to refer to a British nobleman of some kind. It turned out to be “Jack Kevorkian.” (Why was there a song about Kevorkian, you may wonder. The song was really about James A. Moon, a Hoosier who invented a personal guillotine-like device, which, come to think of it, isn’t much better. The song compared him to both Kevorkian and Joseph-Louis Guillotin) But I digress at length.)

Then instead of misheard words, there are misread words. Recently, I saw the word “podcasts” and thought it was “podcats.” This reminded me of a book I read in which kittens grew on trees. Hint: Don’t pick them before they’re ripe.

I also recently thought I heard an ad on TV that I thought said, “No going backpacking,” which I thought was a curious PSA. It was really a political ad sponsored by “No Going Back PAC, Inc.”

Speaking of politics, once an acronym almost got the government in trouble. It was during the Second Gulf War in the early 2000s. (It was also called the Iraq War.) Since every war has to have a name, and every name has an acronym, someone in government suggested Operation Iraqi Liberty, which sounded fine until someone noticed that the acronym would be OIL, which would be too spot on. They quickly changed it to Operation Iraqi Freedom. (I guess they could have named it Operation Arab Freedom, but again the acronym would be appallingly appropriate. But I digress some more.)

Then there are unfortunate web addresses. The one I remember was supposed to say “Ski Mad River,” a local ski slope, at least when it was snowing or their artificial snow machine was working. But their web address came out to skimadriver.com. I inevitably read it as skima-driver. It made me wonder whether a Skima was an Eastern European car that no one in the U.S. bought or an unfortunate successor to Zima, a beverage that no one drinks anymore and probably shouldn’t have in the first place. (I guess you could have a Skima drinker driving a Skima car, but that would present other problems. By the way, I looked up translations of “skima” because of course I did and found that in Icelandic, skima means “glimmer,” which still has nothing to do with skiing. I suppose a glimmer driver would mean someone who has faulty headlights. But I digress even more.)

Do you have any favorite typos, mondegreens, or language fox paws? Feel free to share them in the comments section. Maybe I’ll use them in a future post!

Ring! Ring! Banana-Gram!

etc., funny things, humor, language, music, , , , , ,

When I was a teen, I once said to my mother, “I think I’ll put a banana in my ear.”

“Why?” she asked, incredulous.

“Because if anyone says ‘Why do you have a banana in your ear?’ I can say, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. I’ve got a banana in my ear.'”

Mom laughed and said I had my father’s sense of humor. I don’t know what she meant by that, because Dad never told those kinds of jokes.

Later in life I learned that there is such a thing as a “hearing banana.” It’s what results when you have a hearing test that produces an “audiogram.” If your hearing is good, the chart is shaped like a recognizable banana. If your hearing is wonky, so is the banana.

I think the hearing banana must be involved in what are called “mondegreens,” though hardly anyone knows that’s the name for them or where it comes from. A mondegreen is a misheard song lyric that produces an unexpectedly comical result. The term was coined by a woman who misheard the words in a Scottish ballad. The song really said, “and laid him on the green,” but she heard “Lady Mondegreen.”

Perhaps the two best known of these hearing mishaps are “There’s a Bathroom on the Right” by Creedence Clearwater Revival and “‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy,” by Jimi Hendrix. Well, and all the little children who sing, “Stand beside her/and guide her/through the night with the light from a bulb,” which might be better than the original anyway.

It was a running gag on the TV sitcom Dharma and Greg that the character Greg misheard (and mis-sang) various song lyrics. Two of my favorites were “Got a black magic woman/and she’s tryin’ to take a pebble outta me” and “I can see clearly now, the rain has gone/I can see all the popsicles in my way.”

Working in a place where there is canned music playing can spawn mondegreens like crazy. A friend of mine who works in a retail establishment swore he heard a song that went, “I want the royal gravy. I want the royal gravy. I want the royal gravy. Give it to me.” There was another one that he heard as, “Do you want an egg?”

Being a brave sort, he asked his coworkers what the song lyrics really were. They were, respectively, “I want the good news, baby” and “Do you want to dance?”

I suppose I shouldn’t make fun of this guy. When you’re working in a large store filled with bustling customers, it’s sometimes difficult to tell what someone right next to you is saying, much less something that’s coming over the loudspeaker.

And it may be that my friend just gets hungry at work and that’s why he hears songs about gravy and eggs. Or maybe he goes to work with a banana in his ear.

But the most likely explanation is that his hearing banana looks more like a kumquat or a coconut or something.

Or it could be there’s nothing wrong with him at all.

After all, “egg” does sound a lot like “dance.” Anyone could make that mistake.