Mondegreen
“I thought she was a sandwich.”—Ringo Starr
When it comes to language and learning, the mind can be deceived. Sometimes, the initial interpretation of hearing of a word or phrase is so off-base that a lifetime of skewed mispronunciation or misuse follows. To that point, until my mid-30s, I struggled using the words “bought” and “brought,” constantly mixing them up. When pressed, I usually mumbled a strangled form of “gavotte.” My garbage-in garbage-out pail was definitely overflowing.
But I’m not alone in my errant b/brought-ness. For years, my wife Carla pronounced concoct as “contoct.” Likewise, her sister, Melissa, pronounced sarcophagus as sarco-fay-gus.
Scientists tell us that by the age of five, we’ve heard millions of words spoken, just on the home front. It’s no wonder that some of them fail to launch despite nappies leaking and gabbas squawking. But why is it that certain words get hopelessly fractured on first impact only to require a mighty angst of effort and repetition to set linguistic wrongs aright?
It reminds me of a song by the 80s group, the Clash, called “Rock the Casbah.” If not familiar, the Clash was formed in 1976 in London from key musicians from the original punk movement. They billed themselves as “the only band that matters,” and incorporated elements of post-punk, new wave, reggae, dub, funk, ska, and poodle skirt clean and jerk in their repertoire. “Rock the Casbah” was their sole number one hit in the U.S. off the 1982 album “Combat Rock.”
With synthesizers buzzing and Stratocasters blazing, the song was a quintessential Regan-era head banger. However, I must have heard it in a crowded space the first time. That’s because even with repeated intoning of the song’s title in the refrain, my brain translated it as “fuck the cat box.” It’s been that way ever since.
It turns out there’s a term for what I’ve just described called mondegreen. A quick definition for the word is as follows:
A misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics to a song.
A word about cat boxes before going on. My earliest memories of kitty poop n’ scoop palaces remain drenched in ammonium and cat slag to this day. Fortunately, cat boxes in our house were a short-lived affair as felines did an exit stage left after we moved to New Mexico. Then the cat boxes were replaced by dog doo scattered throughout the back yard. Clean up was a periodic chore that required trowels, shovels, and pinched fortitude.
Back to language/brain malfunction. How did Casbah become cat box? Was my auditory filter on the fritz that day? Or was the immediate environment too noisy for me to accurately be able to hear the song? Maybe it was just poor diction by a bunch of drug-addled rock stars. Regardless, it makes me think that there are times when correcting a faulty install might be counterintuitive. When the new fractured version of a word or phrase is actually better—or at least more useful—than the original. As in please pass the sarco-fay-gas. Or learning that a local brew meister is contocting an impossibly bitter IPA using Brettanomyces as the fermentation yeast. Yes, sometimes newer can be better. But in the end, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.
Fuck the cat box.
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One of the most infamous is Purple Haze: "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy." And I always thought it was "Fuck the casbah," which seemed a bit too neoliberal for Strummer.