by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: January 06, 2008   Last Updated: May 02, 2011

Were it not for wordplay of different kinds, my daily life would be far more boring and tedious than it is. Not that I don't have days that drag by with zero in the way of pleasant activities and diversions. But the brain is a playground unaffected by foul weather or power outage. My cerebral slides, swings and monkey bars get more use when my body is lying in bed half asleep than they do in wakeful alertness.

Slap me into solitary confinement, shackle my limbs, douse the lights and I will amuse myself with mental diversions such as composing poetry, crafting puns or inventing word games. Put me in a freeway traffic jam and I will scan the lanes for license plates that are amusing acronyms or initials of people I have known. I enjoy figuring out what message is intended with vanity plates. I wonder how the driver up in Menlo Park got away with IM1RU12. I smile at the irony of the ultra-economical Prius that, if you believe its plate, gets only 5MPG, but grow weary of seeing the SUV at the golf course and its H83PUTT.

The dictionaries only recently accepted a beautiful-sounding word for language oddities I have been collecting since my childhood. The word is MONDEGREEN, and it denotes a word or words that result from the mishearing or misinterpretation of a statement or song lyric. It's derived from its coiner's listening as a child to her mother's reading of a ballad from "Percy's Reliques" about the death of the Earl of Murray. One couplet (translated from the original Scottish dialect) speaks of how "They have slain the Earl O' Murray/ And laid him on the green." The child heard the last line as Lady Mondegreen, and our vast language is now enriched by a new word.

As a child in a Catholic boarding school, I had to say prayers along with fellow students and the nun in charge of us. Repeating some of these "ejaculations" for my mother, I confused her with "Mary Constantine, pray for us who have a corset tea." That was my hearing of "Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee."

Probably the most common mondegreen and one which needs no explanation is the opening line of the Mexican-American national anthem: Jose, can you see. As a teacher, I used to get dozens of these goofs in student writing. Next door neighbor was rendered as "next store neighbor," which might well apply in a business district to the owner of a business establishment contiguous to one's own. After I explained about the Robert Burns poem that gave John Steinbeck the

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