I said, "Do you speak-a my language?"

[venta]

Yesterday, I mentioned in passing that as a child I'd happily accepted the word "obyjyful" without ever parsing it into the phrase "oh be joyful". I suppose it's not surprising, really - as a baby, you learn to talk by imitating the peculiar sounds that taller people make at you. At learning-to-talk age, analysis isn't usually a strong point and you've not yet caught on to the idea that grown-ups may not be carefully using words in only their most correct of contexts. And, indeed, may be blatantly making words up to fool you.

Similarly, when picking up the words to the songs that trickled steadily out of our record player, I strung together syllables which sounded approximately correct, without ever pausing to wonder whether they made sense. Sometimes, hearing a song in later life, I've been stunned to realise what a complete hash I made of some fairly simple sentences. In some cases, I just matched up the words I heard to words I knew.

According to me (aged 6 or so) the chorus to Go Slow on one of my favourite records (which was a Spinners double album, incidentally) went:

It's bad when you touch me, ice and gale, worse when you touch me, lover-bear

... and it simply never occurred to me to wonder what on earth a bear was doing in the song.

I now hear this as:

It's bad when you touch me, icy gale, worse when you touch me, love affair

However, having attacks of the mondegreens isn't in the least uncommon. Often, as you get older, you realise that what you're singing is daft and reconsider it.

The other day, while doing the washing up I was idly singing to myself. The Tender Coming is an old song which describes the coming of the press gangs to Tyneside.

It's simply never occurred to me to wonder why their coming should be described as "tender". That's just the way the song goes. The press gangs were anything but gentle and tender; "pressing" men - dragging them by trickery, bribery or force - off to serve long stretches on His Majesty's ships.

Here’s the tender coming pressing up my dear,
My dear hinny, take thee away from here

However, a culture which will happily describe the convulsions of a man dying of death by slow strangulation as "dancing on air" should have no qualms about describing the violent advent of the press gangs as "the tender coming".

English seems to be full of these quaint euphemisms for strange or terrible things. The smuggler gangs were the "gentleman", and "marrying the Scavenger's daughter" involved being locked into a metal device designed to crush your internal organs. I find the phrases fascinating, and wonder how often they were used to avoid confronting the real horror of whatever was referred to.

Here's the tender coming, pressing all the men,
My dear hinny, what shall we do then ?

You might argue that applying an adjective to "coming" is a bit of an odd grammatical construction. Not unknown, though. One of my favourite poems begins:

"A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey"

It's rarely used - people would say "arrival" rather than "coming". But if TS Eliot can get away with it, I don't see why I can't.

Here's the tender coming, off from Shield's Bar,
Here's the tender coming, full of men of war

(Bearing in mind, of course, that you're on Tyneside and thus it's perfectly legitimate to rhyme war with bar.

And so it was, as I washed up the large, unwieldy and undishwashersafe bowl of our Kenwood the other day, singing to myself, that a thought suddenly struck me.

They will press you foreign, that is what it means,
Here's the tender coming, full of red marines[*]

It's not the tender coming you're being warned against. It's the tender coming. The tender, the little boat which plies backwards and forwards between the main vessel and the shore. The tender is coming.

Hide, me canny Geordie, hide thyself away
Hide thee til the frigate makes for Druridge Bay

It's taken me more than twenty years to parse that correctly.

[*] Or, if my father is to be believed, "full of kidney beans". He is, I claim, very rarely to be believed.

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

And, indeed, may be blatantly making words up to fool you.

But when you were growing up, you couldn't possibly known yourself as an adult...

[liriselei.livejournal.com]

<smiles at you & gives you a Vegemite sandwich>

i actually heard this on the radio last weekend, in the car on the way back from huggyrei's housewarming... just after snowspider had been talking about quetzyl <grin>

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

I was going to post about having provided a friend in the UK with a Vegemite sandwich (he sheepishly admitted a week later that he left in on our car roof rather than eat it), but elected to eat breakfast instead. Another kudo missed.

One of my favourite mondegreens has got to be "My love has got no money, he's got his strong valise" (not of my devising, I hasten to add).

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

My sister insisted for some time that that was "My lover's got no money, he's a goddess from Belize"...

[ranalf-lj.livejournal.com]

Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard...

apparently :/

[taimatsu]

Beelzebub has a devil in a sack for meeeeeeee, I always thought.

[lathany.livejournal.com]

"marrying the Scavenger's daughter"

There's also "Kissing the Gunner's Daughter" meaning being tied to a cannon and whipped (and also a Ruth Rendell title - which is how I know).

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

For years I thought the Three Kings were of Ory and Tar (which I assumed to be their kingdoms).
And I thought that Meatloaf was announcing homself as a Cilla Black fan on a bike, although I couldn't figure out _why_.

[venta.livejournal.com]

You mean he isn't singing about a Cilla Black fan on a bike ?

Blimey.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

"Rednecks go to hell" for "Right next door to hell".

A variant is the joke that it takes you years to get, dubbed zen hotdogs in some circles.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

That page seems to be combining more than one phenomenon. I think there's a difference between jokes you just don't get for ages and cases where you don't realise there's a joke to get. For example, I've played Chrononauts before and never spotted the Brontosaurus joke... but as soon as the page pointed out there was a joke to get I spotted it immediately.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

There's more than one possible cause, but the effects are similar.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest for addition to your list the joke about whaleweigh stations and pies, but it seems that (in a sort of backwards manner) I've been beaten to it elsewhere on this thread.

I think the Oxford version of the Zen hotdog joke runs as follows:

Descartes heads over to Ahmed's kebab van after a heavy drinking session. Ahmed, slapping doner meat in a pitta bread, says "Do you want chilli sauce with that?"
Descartes, who's heard about Ahmed's chilli sauce says indignantly "I think not!".
Then disappears.

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

"Hey Love" for "Layla" nearly got me lynched by Darrell, "Angel is a Xenophobe" is probably just funny, and I'm sure he can remember one or two other howlers I've committed when singing along to things, desperately trying to identify them.

Given I have a boating background, I parsed tender correctly on first reading without having heard the song before, but I suspect it's purely that I had access to a context in which the alternate meaning made sense.

[venta.livejournal.com]

"Angel is a Xenophobe" is inspired. I shall adopt it henceforth.

My upbringing was more trainspotter than nautical, so I naturally assume a tender is a small waggon for carrying coal. Which didn't seem terribly appropriate in a shipping context; it'd sink.

I do know the word tender as in boats, but I suspect I learnt it long after I learnt the song.

(Becky, ignore the bizarre comment notification you (might) get - I had a fit of complete incompetence and posted a reply to this when it should have gone elsewhere.)

[(Anonymous)]

somewhere over the rainbow
weight a pie...

You're telling it backwards :)

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

"where do you go to find out how heavy your pie is?"

Re: You're telling it backwards :)

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

And where do you go to find out how heavy your whale is?

Re: You're telling it backwards :)

[(Anonymous)]

A railway station!

Re: You're telling it backwards :)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I'm going off this lack of cookies thing...

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

My son (age 6) was singing along to Space Oddity the other day. He sang: "Ground Control to Major Tom, take your floating pill and put your helmet on". The whole idea that pills make you float in space is wonderful!

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

"Come up and see me,
make me smile.
I'll do what you want,
in a while"

is apparently meant to be
"...I'll do what you want,
running wild"

or somesuch nonsense.

[a-llusive.livejournal.com]

an old one is "lamzytotes"


My mother later discovered that
"Lambs eat oats"

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Surely it's "mairzy" and "doazy doats", whereas "liddle lambsy divey"? I'm not sure that counts against your mother, since the lyrics are wilfully mispronounced.

[(Anonymous)]

My mother assures me that when she was around student-age, the large sign which read "Mersey Docks and Harbour Board" was very much improved by the paint addition of "and liddle lambsy divey".

Disappointingly, I don't believe she was responsible for it.

[venta.livejournal.com]

That was me.

[pm215]

I hadn't put you down as the graffiti artist type :-)

[venta.livejournal.com]

;p

[(Anonymous)]

T S Eliot didn't say it, that's why. He pinched it from a Christmas sermon by Lancelot Andrew(e)s in the late
Middle Ages.

[pm215]

Available online (albeit with an incorrect character set indication).

[pm215]

(and the reason that it says 'coming' rather than 'arrival' or 'journey' is that he's banging on about venimus (did all mediaeval sermons have this degree of close textual analysis of the Latin?))

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think I'm vaguely surprised to hear there were many medieval sermons which weren't in Latin. Certainly I'd expect any sermon of the era to be based around a biblical text, and English bibles were a pretty contraversial idea. Even in the 14thC the poor old Lollards were still being burned as heretics for going round trying to popularise Wycliffe's translation of the New Testament.

Sweet Roland falls in brie

[j4.livejournal.com]

The smuggler gangs were the "gentleman"

Ah-ha! I know that one. "Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by..." [earworm]

You might argue that applying an adjective to "coming" is a bit of an odd grammatical construction.

What, as in "the second coming"? Mind you, if Yeats and Eliot were both at it, it must be one of them there weird modernist things. 8-)

Now, I remember trying to decode the lyrics to "Cam Ye O'er Frae France" (as featured on my Steeleye Span Greatest Hits tape) back in the days before Google, and you don't want to know what kind of mess I made of them...

Re: Sweet Roland falls in brie

[venta.livejournal.com]

Sweet Roland falls in brie

Kate Bush ?

Cam Ye O'er Frae France

All bets are off once people start writing in brogue.

[hjalfi.livejournal.com]

This sounds like the ideal moment to plug this (http://www.verylowsodium.com/fanimutation/exuberance.php), which if it hasn't melted your brain yet, you obviously haven't seen.