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.