Route 17: A Dark, Sad Night In Mondegreen Alley

A few weeks ago, I did a column, "Tangled Up In Rav Kook," that was prefaced with this verse from Dylan.

"Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me,
Written by an Italian poet from the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burnin' coals,
Pourin' off of every page like it was written in my soul
From me to you,
Tangled up in blue."

I heard the song on the car radio as I was "writing" (writing in my head) the column was about a man whose life was entangled by his passion for Rav Kook's poetry. His ex-wife had first given him a Rav Kook anthology for his birthday. As I was writing, I "heard" Dylan's line about the "Italian" poet as "Hebrew" poet.

When I used the verse in preface to the column, I included the verse as I heard it in my mind, placing it in hard brackets [written by a Hebrew poet from the 20th century] to differentiate it from the correct lyrics.

A friend from the inner sanctum of the very Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, who previously had e-mailed me positively for a reference to the Grateful Dead, this time  e-mailed, "Blasphemy!" How dare I play around with Dylan's lyrics! It was much too unorthodox of me, he was right, and he was Orthodox enough to care.

There is a word - a "mondegreen" for hearing one verse but imagining another. A mondegreen is a literary phenomenon, coined by Sylvia Wright in an article of her own in Harper's, several decades ago. She recalls being a child, and someone read a poem to her, a 17th century ballad, "The Bonnie Earl O' Murray," whose last verse goes:

"Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
  Oh, where hae ye been?
  They hae slain the Earl O'Murray,
   And Lady Mondegreen."

Not quite. But that's how Sylvia Wright heard the final line, "And laid him on the green." And so she coined the "mondegreen," for all those times you actually hear one set of words but imagine it as another.

"Tangled Up In Blue" also includes one of the more frequent Dylan mondegreens. The actual line is "split up on a dark, sad night, both agreeing it was best."

But many people know the line as its incorrect mondegreen: "split up on the docks that night, both agreeing it was best."

Perhaps the most famous mondegreen is "Jose, Can You See," for the first line of the "Star Spangled Banner." I'm told that once on "Friends," Phoebe heard Elton John's "Hold me closer, Tiny Dancer," as "Hold me closer, Tony Danza." Some gays hear Jimi Hendrix, "Excuse me while I kiss the sky," as "Excuse me while I kiss the guy." Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle does a column every few months on mondegreens he has known.

Before the popularity of radio, television and hand-held tape recorders,  more than a few journalists made mistakes when the reporter wrote what he thought he heard, not what was actually said. One can only wonder how many news stories and reports of famous speeches were mangled by mondegreens.

Lou Gehrig's "Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth" farewell at Yankee Stadium, July 4, 1939, offers a wonderful example of this, as we have the film of the speech (not easily seen at the time) to cross-check with what reporters from The Washington Post and The New York Times thought they heard. (The Gehrig ceremony took place between games of a Yanks-Senators doubleheader, which is why the Washington Post was there,)

The speech is considered baseball's Gettysburg Address.

The Washington Post reporter in the Yankee Stadium press box that day was  Shirley Povich, a child of Jewish immigrants and the father of TV's Maury Povich. Povich, whose immigrant parents must have heard that Shirley was a Jewish name, so why not for their son, was later given the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor given to baseball writers, bringing with it a plaque in baseball's Hall of Fame.

Povich was a first-rate writer and reporter for more than fifty years. And here's how he reported what Gehrig said:

"For weeks, I have been reading in the newspapers that I am a fellow who got a tough break. I don't believe it. I have been a lucky guy… Mine has been a full life."

Not quite.

According to John Drebinger of The New York Times, another winner of the Spink Award, here's what Gehrig said:

"You've been reading about my bad breaks for weeks now. But today I think I'm the luckiest man alive.  I now feel, more than ever, that I have much to live for."

Wrong again. Both first-rate journalists were there at the stadium when Gehrig said he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth and neither man correctly reported the quote right in the next day's paper.

Click on to the online American Rhetoric site of great American speeches (where you can read and listen to what Gehrig actually said) :

"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth… I might have been given a bad break but I've got an awful lot to live for."

Scroll down that page and you can hear the version spoken by Gary Cooper in "Pride of the Yankees." The movie's screenwriters came up with a mangled version, too.

Some of my fellow media watchers presume that all mistakes by journalists are acts of malice ("Go ask Alice") rather than modegreens that happen to us all.

Gentle reader, if you ever catch me in a blasphemy, just e-mail me on a dark, sad night and I'll meet you on the docks.

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