I Led The Pigeons to the Mondegreen
It should come as no surprise to any American that this has been one benighted year, so Fourth of July celebrations may tend to be muted — though unfortunately not enough to discourage some mischief-maker from setting his house afire with quasi-legal fireworks.
Nevertheless reasons to celebrate Independence Day still remain. One is the fact that (according to Rachel Maddow) annus horribilis is more than half-way over, and the other is that Americans of all so-called “stripes” still manage to recall our national traditions.
Nearly every public school kid learns to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which decades ago provided the topic for a Reader’s Digest article and a language column by the late, great William Safire (1929-2009.)
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/14/magazine/100-years-new-york-times-language-may-27-1979-led-pigeons-flag.html
Kids often mangle the exact pronunciation of words and repeat what they believe they are hearing, such as reciting the opening phrase as “I led the pigeons to the flag.” Safire first characterizes such language quirks as “false homonyms,” but ultimately corrects the term to metanalysis, an aural phenomenon that occurs in the process of acquiring language.
As it turns out, grown-ups as well as children often write and mispronounce words and phrases. Safire mentions a variety of celebrities of the past whose names have been misheard. Once I had a student whose composition on “A Person I Admire” extolled the virtues of deep sea explorer and TV star Jocko Stove. Another term for the elements of quirky talk is “eggcorns.”
An archived article from The Atlantic explores the subject further with other fascinating language oddities, such as eggcorns, misquotations, and mondegreens.
Jen Doll does culture a good service by examining misquoted movie lines. The online article actually features a clip from the film, Casablanca. But I have to say that the most quoted line from that movie doesn’t have anything to do with piano playing. Instead it concerns feigned surprise over the presence of gambling in the establishment. Ironically, that particular line of dialogue is quoted exactly. Although the movie was released nearly 80 years ago, these days it’s almost against an unwritten law to express a certain term only once. One must say, “I’m shocked. Shocked.”
The same kind of late coinage affected a term stemming from a movie released a year later. More and more we hear about politicians, the Media, pop culture, etc. manipulating a person’s perception of reality just as Charles Boyer did to Ingrid Bergman in that film. Popping up in 60s slang, the phrase began to appear in clinical journals in the 70s, but the term’s really popular now: “gaslighting.”
Regardless of the quality of our auditory skills (age-related or otherwise), few of us can claim to have heard every song lyric correctly. This is understandable, since most pop and rock vocalists for the past half-century have been unintelligible, despite the grimaces and tightly-shut eyes, which fans could see — and sometimes swoon over — as seen on TV. So much for sprezzatura.
Quite the opposite of Nat King Cole and his articulate phrasing, singers mumbled and slurred their words so much that the record labels decided to print the lyrics on the back of the LP album covers. Because of this, some spelling variants of English became more common. For instance, today we are more likely to see the phrase “all right” spelled as “alright.”
No wonder so many of us heard meanings beyond the artists’ intention. Thus the phenomenon of the “mondegreen,” a highly individualistic mishearing of a song lyric. The Atlantic article cites a listener who thought that the Beatles song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” referred to Peanuts characters: “Lucy in the Sky with Linus.” (Incidentally, the song led to a semi-popular parody called “Judy in Disguise with Glasses.”)
Yours fooly was more a Sinatra fan as well of early jazzmen, such as “Big Spider Beck” cited by Safire, not to mention “the loneliest monk,” about whom a teen reporter asked the saxophone-playing Bill Clinton. I also liked sitcoms. So I didn’t associate “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” with an allusion to LSD. I thought it was about Lucy dropping her scheme to get into Ricky’s show in order to take up astronomy.
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/14/magazine/100-years-new-york-times-language-may-27-1979-led-pigeons-flag.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2012/09/ways-which-we-mistake-our-words/323150/
