When I Use a Word ... Words misheard: medical mondegreens

Abstract

A girl with colitis goes by . With apologies to John Lennon and Paul McCartney I recently heard a Radio 3 announcer mention ‘Kodaly's Buttocks Pressing Song ’. Could he have been referring to the great Hungarian composer's oratorio, the Psalmus Hungarsicus ? Or was it ‘ Bartok ' s Precious Song ’, a homage to his illustrious contemporary, born in the year before him? Neither, as it turned out—it was ‘O could I but express in song’ by the Russian composer Leonid Malashkin. This kind of homophonic error is called a mondegreen. I expect that few will have heard of the American journalist Sylvia Wright. In her day, she was a well-known contributor to magazines such as Harper ' s , Harper ' s Bazaar , and The Atlantic Monthly , a sort of female James Thurber, a comparison that the title of one of her articles, ‘Whose world?—And welcome to it’, made explicit. Sylvia Wright coined the word ‘mondegreen’ in an article published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954, ‘The Death of Lady Mondegreen’.1 ‘When I was a child,’ she wrote, ‘my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques [of Ancient English Poetry] . One of my favorite poems began, as I remember: Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, Oh, where hae ye been? They hae slain the Earl Amurray, [ sic ] And Lady Mondegreen.’ ‘By now,’ she went on, after a digression or two, several of you more alert readers are jumping up and down in your impatience to interrupt and point out that, according …