Thursday November 15, 2007
Mondegreens and false friends
By VANCE CARSON
MUSIC makes the bored Shah see Auntie rubble, sang Madonna.“Soya crab the girls and you grab a cuppa malt,” sang Justin Timberlake. “Ham loo I believe I will die,” sang Eiffel 65.
Or did they?
Actually, the correct lyrics of their songs are:
“Music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel”, “So you grab the girls and you grab a couple more” and “I’m blue da bee dee da bee die”.
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Open 24 Jam: Tourists who do not know Bahasa Malaysia may think that this store sells 24 varieties of jam. |
When you mishear a song lyric, a line from a poem or a phrase used in everyday conversation, it is called a “mondegreen”. It’s a funny term coined by American writer Sylvia Wright in 1954, after she misheard a line from a poem: “and Lady Mondegreen” instead of the actual line, “and laid him on the green”.
Mondegreens are therefore associated with homophones, or words which sound the same as another word, usually with a completely different meaning. For example, bear (animal) and bare (naked).
If you go to Scotland, you may wonder why someone offers you “a week up a tree” and then complains about their “week off”. On hearing this, perhaps you’d make a polite excuse to leave the person’s company, for surely if you had a week off work, the last place you’d wish to spend it would be in the branches of a tree.
But what the kind Scottish person actually offered you was “a wee (small) cup of tea”, before moaning about being sick and having a “wee cough”.
It was in Scotland that I first encountered mondegreens, firstly while listening to the music of guitar legend Jimi Hendrix. In his hit song ‘Purple Haze’, he sings “scuse me while I kiss the sky”, but most people hear the lyric as “scuse me while I kiss this guy”. A curious thing for such a notorious womaniser to publicly announce.
I also was certain Hendrix mentioned my name in a song; “they’re all as bold as love, just as Vance is”. But what he actually said was “they’re all as bold as love, just as the Axis”, whatever that means.
Another mondegreen was discovered upon my introduction to a Sikh girl called Rupa Dilber. As soon as someone told me her name, I went red in the face and tried desperately not to laugh. I didn’t want her to think I was being racist and mocking her lovely Indian name. But I couldn’t help being amused by the fact that I had actually met a person who was named after a cartoon character, “Rupert the Bear”.
Back here in Malaysia, I recently experienced a peculiar mondegreen during Hari Raya. I kept hearing people talking about the “idol victory”, leaving me rather baffled as to the identity of the victorious idol in question.
Of course, there was no idol; everyone was talking about the Muslim festival of “Eid ul-Fitr”. I had tried to make sense of the Malaysian pronunciation of “Eid”, a word which I had previously heard as rhyming with “seed”, rather than “hide”. My mistake was trying to work out what I’d heard, based on words which I had heard in the past.
This is a common mistake we make when we encounter “false friends”, a grammatical term referring to a phrase or word in another language which we try to match with similar sounding words in our own language.
Don’t be fooled by these false friends – many words in different languages may sound the same and even share identical or related spelling, but they may have completely unrelated meanings.
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... or that nasi goreng is a culinary salute to Hitler’s henchman named Hermann Göring! |
For example, a British person travelling around France may see the word beurre on a café sign and correctly assume that it was the French word for butter. However, if he continued his travels into Spain and saw the word burro, he would get a shock if he then went to a café and asked for some burro and toast. A burro is a donkey! Mantequilla is Spanish for butter.
Bahasa Malaysia has some amusing false friends for English speakers. A foreign visitor may be shocked to discover a popular Malaysian dish named after the WWII Nazi Luftwaffe commander, Hermann Göring. Yet nasi goreng is simply “fried rice” and is not a culinary salute to one of Hitler’s henchmen.
The English speaker may be thirsty after eating his fried rice, and may become thoroughly disheartened to find only air is available to drink. Only in a bizarre world of surreal fantasy can one drink air, he may think, failing to realise that air is “water” in Bahasa Malaysia.
Crossing a busy road to a petrol station, the same tourist may notice a garage sign announcing “24 Jam”. The tourist may be delighted by this news, as he loves jam and fruit preservatives. However, his joy would certainly be short-lived, for instead of finding a selection of 24 different flavours of jam, he would simply find that the petrol station never closes.
False friends played another cruel trick on the frustrated visitor, as jam is BM for “hour” or a word referring to time.
Depressed and embarrassed by his day of misunderstandings, this tired and thirsty tourist may return to his hotel and switch on the radio. He may then hear a Golden Oldie by the band Creedence Clearwater Revival, and wonder why they sing “there’s a bathroom on the right”. This is just not the weary traveller’s day, for the misheard lyric is actually “there’s a bad moon on the rise”.
Mondegreens and false friends, they amuse, bemuse and confuse, but don’t let them make a fool of you. Remember “for Wanda’s four arms” – oops, sorry, I mean “forewarned is forearmed”.
Vance Carson is a Project English Teacher for CfBT Malaysia at Sekolah Menengah Agama Persekutuan Kajang.
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