Round John Virgin and Other Mondegreens

Christmas seems to encourage mondegreens.  In case you were not paying attention in your rhetoric class, a mondegreen is a mis-hearing of a poem or song lyric that ideally precipitates gales of uncontrollable laughter.  The word was coined in 1954 by Sylvia Wright in an essay titled “The Death of Lady Mondegreen” in Harper’s Magazine.  Wright recounted that as a child she used to hear a Scottish ballad that went (she thought)

      Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,

      O, where hae ye been?

      They hae slain the Earl o’ Murray

      And Lady Mondegreen.

What they had done, of course, was to have slain the Earl and laid him on the green, and thus gave rise to a new bit of wordplay. 

The most famous Christmas mondegreen is probably “Round John Virgin” in “Silent Night,” but there are plenty of others, all of which purport to be actual misapprehensions by some befuddled listener. You may have heard of Rudolph’s companion, “Olive, the other reindeer,” or perhaps you have sung joyfully, “Noël, Noël, Barney’s the King of Israel.” Others have proclaimed “Get dressed, ye married gentlemen, let nothing through this May.”

“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” so the song says, and some people believe “they’re going to build a toilet town all around the Christmas tree.”  Probably the same people revel in a “Winter Wonderland” because “in the meadow we can build a snowman and pretend that he is sparse and brown” and “later on we’ll perspire as we drink by the fire.”

The champion, however, is the poor benighted soul who conjured up the painful image in “The Christmas Song” of “Jeff’s nuts roasting on an open fire.”

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has a little trouble these days hearing song lyrics (and other things, as well), but he managed to come up with this seasonal ditty; then, giving a nod, up the escalator he rose.

     CAROL FOR A STREET-CORNER SANTA      

      It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,

      I feel in very fine fettle.

      But the Salvation Army

      Sent its band to alarm me

      By playing a carol in front of my kettle.

      It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,

     And, it’s fun to be St. Nicholas,

     But Santas find it bewilderin’        

     That some little children

     Like to pull on our beards and pinch us and tickle us.

     It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,

     In fact, I think Christmas is here.

     I’ll just pick up my check

     And then hope like heck

     That I won’t have to put on a red suit next year.