Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Looking at the MLA Interactive Language Map is fascinating. What a neat toy.

Just for yucks, I decided to look up Yiddish, and found some surprising concentrations. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere in the country that reports > 99 Yiddish speakers (or maybe 199, the colors being very similar) until you drill down for a closer look. There you can see a few pockets of the up to 19,999. For instance Philadelphia has 2,922 Yiddish speakers.

One surprise was the entire top of Maine was colored in. Changing the view to By Zip instead of By County and the top of Maine shrunk to a tiny dot. I’m picturing this one old Jew living on the rocky shore, contributing his Yiddish to the county score. Conclusion: Aroostook is one big-ass county, particularly for a New England state. Ayuh.

Thanks to Language Hat for the link

I just realized that in the previous post I mis-attributed my misheard Flip, Flop, Fly to the songwriters of the original. Obviously they didn’t actually write what I thought I heard, but does that mean my mondegreen ought to be attributed to me? In terms of copyright it’s a derivative work, so I couldn’t actually claim sole ownership of the rights to the “new” version, though it’s not clear to me off the top of my head whether the current owners of the copyright to the song would be able to claim ownership either. The legal situation is made more complicated by the system of compulsory licensing that’s in place for songs: in the US you cannot legally prevent someone from performing a cover version of your song as long as they pay you royalties (except that you do have the “right of first recording”) and do not “substantially alter” your song. What happens if someone did substantially alter the song? I don’t know. What, you expect me to do some real research? I suspect that the compulsory license provisions wouldn’t apply, and you might have to do some genuine negotiation if you could track down the copyright owners; not necessarily an easy task, particularly when the original creator(s) are dead. Oh, and then there’s parody and the First Amendment.

Mothers, don’t let your sons grow up to be IP lawyers…

update: Ok, just for you I did a little research, at least to the extent of googling up this.

Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocket ship
Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocket ship
When the blues overtake me gonna rocket right away from here

Flip, Flop, Fly - Calhoun/ Big Joe Turner

I’m embarrassed to admit how many years it was before I realized that this was a mondegreen.
(Mondegreen is a name for the kind of global mishearing of the Scuse me while I kiss this guy sort, coined by Sylvia Wright, who misheard They had slain the Earl of Moray/And laid him on the green as They had slain the Earl of Moray/And Lady Mondegreen)

The actual lyrics are

Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocking chair
Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocking chair
When the blues overtake me gonna rock it right away from here

Personally, I think mine make more sense, but I admit that’s an unusual case. I don’t know whether I’m particularly prone to mondegreens, but I’ve certainly come up with some doozies.
For instance, it was only a few months ago that I realized that the Allman Brothers song did not go Lord, I was born and raised in Maine . I see by Google that at least some other people hear it as Lord, I was born in Rambling Maine, so I’m not a complete loon. And I thought that Chaka Khan was being a bit ambitious when she wanted to Climb Every Woman (It turns out that she was actually stating the claim I’m Every Woman. But so is Whitney Houston. Does that mean that Chaka and Whitney are the same person?)

Possibly my favorite that I didn’t hear myself is “I see a Renoir and I want to paint it black”.

What are your favorite mondegreens?