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FUN WITH YOUR BRAIN

Glancing at a reader's newspaper contribution, I thought the headline said, "Relatives of artistic lead lives of agony." It was actually "autistic." But when my brain rewrites copy it's often more interesting than the original. As a small child I asked my mother about that phenomenon: When you misread or mishear something, is what you think you see or hear purely a creation of your own mind, or simply a physical glitch of the eyes or ears? She said that what I think I hear comes from my brain.

Certainly there are instances where you get something wrong because of a physical quirk external to yourself. For instance, picture a motel sign by the highway partially blocked by a tree or another building: "LOW RAT". If you're not too tired, you'll know the sign reads "LOW RATES" but you still might not want to stop there.

Fred's sister Judy came up with this mondegreen when she was a kid: "Joshua spit tobacco on Jericho." She misheard the words of the old spiritual, "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho." ("Fit" is a version of "fought".) I used to hear "truly bear" in the old song "Truly Fair" so I always pictured the singer bringing trinkets and flowers for the golden hair of a big blonde bear. Since everyone was always feeding kids stories and songs about talking animals, a love song to a bear didn't strike me as odd.

Different people mishear lyrics differently, bolstering the theory that mondegreens come from within. When you look up Queen on www.kissthisguy.com, you'll find several different versions of the line "Another one bites the dust!" And of course Weird Al Yankovic has made a career out of mondegreens; he had a hit with "Another One Rides the Bus".

Song lyrics are not the only things misheard, of course. Someone on TV said: "It looked like they had a beat on us." Fred pointed out that this should be "had a bead on us." The bead on a rifle is what helps you aim. So often we imitate the sounds we hear without understanding their meaning.

THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT

Ever heard of the Great Vowel Shift? In the 15th century, English pronunciation changed at about the same time spelling was becoming standardized, which accounts for many of the oddities of our spelling. Wikipedia says:

... the vowel in the English word make was originally pronounced as in modern English father, but has now become a diphthong, as it is today in standard pronunciations of British English ... the vowel in feet was originally pronounced as a long Latin-like e sound; the vowel in mice was originally what the vowel in feet is now; the vowel in boot was originally a long Latin-like o sound, which has been preserved in "door"; and the vowel in mouse was originally what the vowel in moose is now, but has now become a diphthong.

A writer on another web site on the GVS notes that today anyone might pronounce "route" to rhyme with either "boot" or "shout" in the same conversation. I've done that myself. Grew up saying "root" but heard other people say "rout". My parents came from Appalachia. Many of the early immigrants to the southern U.S. and Appalachia came from Scotland. Some of the older pronunciations, pre-GVS, were retained in areas such as Scotland. Remember that when you hear some unusual vowel pronunciations.

According to the Wikipedia entry, the shift may have happened because large numbers of people moved to southeast England after the black death, and there was an attempt to standardize pronunciation. This doesn't explain why it shifted one way and not the other, though.

NOBLE GAS

One of the many things I forgot from high school chemistry: a noble gas or a noble metal is one that is not easily altered by contact with other elements or chemicals. Interesting concept of nobility, one which seems foreign now.

MY BABY DADDY

You've probably noticed the phrase "my baby daddy" for some time now. There's even a movie with a cleaned-up title, My Baby's Daddy. You can find this and "my baby momma" at Urban Dictionary: Browse M. A local, generally worthless advice columnist told one of his writers that considering the suburb she was from, she didn’t have the "street cred" (street credentials) to use the phrase "my baby daddy" when she wrote to ask if he was perhaps the father of her child. "My baby daddy" or "momma" implies biological reproduction without a relationship of any substance between the parents. The reality is not at all as cute as the slang.

BOOKS ONLINE

Think it'll be a long winter? Strap yourself into your computer chair and read a book online.

Project Gutenberg continues to put books online (out of copyright).

Google has a new and controversial project to put books online that may still be copyrighted. They ambitiously want to make libraries available online, for one thing, and are also working with some publishers. Some publishers don't like the idea. We'll see.

Bartleby.com puts classics online for downloading.

The Church of Latter Day Saints is digitizing family history books and putting them online.

The University of Pennsylvania has more than 25,000 books online.

Scott Adams (Dilbert cartoonist) has written a book he thinks highly of, God's Debris.

NAME GAMES

Back in August, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas said she thought hurricanes ought to be given black names once in a while, in the interests of diversity. Years ago feminists objected to the fact that hurricanes only had female names, so names have been alternating female-male for quite a while.

I wasn't able to find anything about Lee's proposal on her web site. Maybe there was a news release or something before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but there's a great big gap in her news releases: nothing for August. Maybe she decided it wasn't such a great honor after all. How do you recognize a black name anyway? Lee's name is Sheila, but she suggested names like Keisha, Jamal, and Deshawn. What she called black names are names invented by blacks in the last 30 years or so (well, Jamal is an Arab name). Keisha might be Arabic too, according to Baby Names - Origin, Meaning of Keisha. "Deshawn" looks to me like a combination of the prefix "de" which is a French prefix meaning "of" as in "of the family of". "Shawn" looks like an alternate spelling of "Sean," an Irish name. These names haven't been "black" very long.

A 1946 movie, Lady in the Lake, has a couple of names for characters that could only have been made up by a scriptwriter in the 1940s: Derace (pronounced Derris) Kingsby and Adrienne Fromsett. They sound like funny names S. J. Perelman would have invented. He did not work on that movie, however. But why are those names so funny, so fake, and so forties? I don't know. I didn't find Fromsett in the Genealogy.com surname list, and a web search turns up only references to the movie. A web search for Derace does turn up a few people besides the movie character, but maybe their mothers had seen the movie. (My mom had seen Rhonda Fleming in the movies; she didn't know about the Welsh town and river named Rhondda.)

A CHRISTMAS STORY

You've probably added A Christmas Story to your list of favorite Christmas movies: little Ralphie wants a Red Ryder BB gun, but his mom says no, because "You'll shoot our eye out!" Jean Shepherd, the author and narrator, died in 1999. His fan web site, http://www.flicklives.com/, is named for his childhood friend Flick, who was the boy in the movie whose tongue froze to a pole. But don't forget Scut Farkas, the bully with yellow eyes. Scut means a rabbit's tail, and Farkas is a real surname. Scriptwriters know that a word or name with the letter K tends to be funny.

Retreat: The Essence of Christian Mysticism

Bernadette Roberts

I am organizing a workshop with Bernadette Roberts, a remarkable Christian contemplative and author of three books:

The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center

The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey

What is Self? : A Study of the Spiritual Journey in Terms of Consciousness

This retreat, called The Essence of Christian Mysticism, will be held on the weekend of May 5-7, 2006, in Loveland, Ohio. For more information, go to Bernadette Roberts Retreat (www.keithops.us/brretreat.htm). NOTE: The web page has been changed to allow viewing with different kinds of browsers.

If you buy these or any other books from Amazon, using the link below, I'll get a tiny commission, and I'd appreciate it.

Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!

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