 Singer Jose Feliciano had a hit in the 1970s with a cheerful song called Feliz Navidad, Spanish for Merry Christmas. My wife, who will never let me near her again when she reads this, misheard the phrase and thought he was singing "Bobby's mummy died".
She had fallen victim to a mondegreen - the mishearing of a lyric in a way that gives it a new, often hilarious, meaning. We've all done it of course. Or so I'm told. "Mondegreen" was coined by American Sylvia Wright after she misheard a line from the 17th-century ballad "The Bonny Earl Moray". What she heard was: "They hae slain the Earl O'Moray And Lady Mondegreen." The actual lyric, however, was: "They hae slain the Earl O'Moray And laid him on the green." Song lyrics seem to be the most popular source of mondegreens, perhaps because singers tend to worry less about careful pronunciation, which is putting it kindly. Famous examples include "scuse me while I kiss this guy" (real lyric: "scuse me while I kiss the sky" - Jimi Hendrix), and "there is a bathroom on the right" instead of "there is a bad moon on the rise", from Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising". Eventually both Hendrix and CCR began singing the mondegreen versions of these lyrics in concert. In the 1980s, Maxell tapes produced a couple of classic ads based on the mondegreen phenomenon - check them out here and here.
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 Mortgages have been much in the news lately, especially for first time home buyers living in Auckland. What better time, then, to investigate the origins of this unusual word.
One of the first things you might notice is the silent 't', which is a big clue about the word's history. It comes from the Old French morgage, which is a portmanteau word derived from mort (dead) and gaige (pledge). Why is "dead" in there? Because with a mortgage, the deal dies once when the debt is paid (or if the borrower fails to make payment, and we all know what happens then). The English, in a rare display of concern for the French language, reintroduced the 't' when they borrowed the word from their neighbours. Mort is found in a handful of English words such as mortal, mortuary and mortician. One word that you might think owes its existence to mort but doesn't is morgue. That word comes from a building in Paris that was used to display bodies hauled from the Seine so their nearest and dearest could identify them. It comes from the Old French morguer, "look solemnly", which is one thing that dead people can be counted on to do. So too, one imagines, could those wandering the Morgue searching for their missing, dimwitted cousin, last seen wading into the Seine shouting "see, told you the current wasn't very strong here." |
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