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A more recent phenomenon that expands upon the original concept of the mondegreen (song or poem lyrics misunderstood) is the deliberate misunderstanding known as buffalax. The term comes from the YouTube user name of someone who found a music video in Tamil and added subtitles spelling out what the song lyrics sound like if you interpret them as English.
Here's the original buffalax video. (Note that as of this posting it's been viewed over 23 million times!)
For comparison on how the practice has spread, here's a song by one of my favorite artists in Taiwan. In this one the original music video is discarded in favor of a flash animation that depicts the spurious "English" lyrics.
This is great. It is not so much a new take, but a very new medium for an old take. It is good that it finally has a name. Thank you for pointing this out.
I will not tell you in what year I was introduced to this work of Luis d'Antin van Rooten published in 1967:
Mots d'heures: Gousses, Rames (Mother Goose Rhymes)
Wikipedia on Mots d'heures: Gousses, Rames
An excerpt (perhaps one of the most memorable — Un petit d'un petit — Humpty Dumpty):
Un petit d'un petit
S'étonne aux Halles
Un petit d'un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu'importe un petit d'un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes.
One of the great features of this magnum opus — clearly a seminal work to have foreshadowed this modern phenomenon — is that the author glosses various phrases and, in a mockery of scholarship, provides interpretation of the actual meaning of the French (translation mine):
e.g.
Un petit d'un petit [1] [trans.: A child of a child]
S'étonne aux Halles [2] [trans.: Gapes at Les Halles] …
[1] The inevitable result of a child marriage.
[2] The subject of this epigrammatic poem is obviously from the provinces, since a native Parisian would take this famous old market for granted.
Ron Draney said:
A more recent phenomenon that expands upon the original concept of the mondegreen (song or poem lyrics misunderstood) is the deliberate misunderstanding known as buffalax. The term comes from the YouTube user name of someone who found a music video in Tamil and added subtitles spelling out what the song lyrics sound like if you interpret them as English.
Here's the original buffalax video. (Note that as of this posting it's been viewed over 23 million times!)
For comparison on how the practice has spread, here's a song by one of my favorite artists in Taiwan. In this one the original music video is discarded in favor of a flash animation that depicts the spurious "English" lyrics.
I was confused the first time a classmate of mine mentioned a new band called "Hall and Oats." We went back and forth a few times:
"It's Hall 'n' Oats"
"Haulin' Oats?"
"No, Hall 'n' Oats!"
He finally resorted to saying "Hall … NNNNNN … Oats." I still didn't understand until I saw a poster. My classmate's inability to enunciate "and" is fuel for another topic…
Sometimes the distinctive phonemes just don't transmit. I remember one Christmas my brother kept trying to correct my grandmother, over the phone, because he thought she kept calling Nintendo "Intendo". Turned out she was pronouncing the initial consonant; the phone just wasn't picking up the sound of it.
I had a similar experience some years later (where I couldn't blame the phone) when I tried to tell someone I wanted to see "Prospero's Books" (the surreal Peter Greenaway version of "The Tempest" starring John Gielgud). She kept thinking I was all het up about "Ross Perot's books".
My Young Padawan said:
How about this?
http://moose-cow.ytmnd.com/
I loved this one too. I was unfamiliar with the song, but from my internet research, it appears to be "Moskau" by Dschinghis Khan.
Clearly I enjoy these more than most of my friends and associates, who now greet me with wan smiles and give me more personal space.
On YTMND, there is an entire "fad", or meme, about Mondegreens (specifically, alternate interpretations of or intentional mis-hearings of song lyrics) called "Dew Army". It began with this site (http://dew.ytmnd.com/) which uses part of David Hasselhoff's "Du" (which is German for "you"), along with the English word "DEW!!!!!!!".
YTMND even has a fad wiki: http://wiki.ytmnd.com/Dew_Army
On of my favorites is one I heard from my mother. She grew up in rural north Georgia during the depression. They would begin each school day by singing God Bless America. For years, she misunderstood the phrase "Stand beside her, and guide her, through the night, with a light from above." My mother thought the phrase was "with a light from a bulb." She thought they were singing about the day when they would all get electricity!
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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